As Meta Blocks News From Facebook In Canada, Local News Is Hurting The Most

I'm Vicki Hogarth, and this isn't NewsBreak26. If you're watching this video on Facebook and you live in Canada, you are either one of the last Canadians to be blocked by Meta from news content, or you're following me, Vicki Hogarth, on my personal page where I've scrambled to start posting important updates for the community while being careful not to use the word "news". If you are watching this video on television and you live outside Charlotte County, you obviously subscribe to Bell because Rogers refuses to carry CHCO-TV outside of Charlotte County despite New Brunswick being a geographically small news desert with one of the highest media concentrations in Canada. That's partly why we've relied so heavily on Facebook over the years to reach New Brunswickers. With 28,000 followers on Facebook—a number that surpasses the actual population of Charlotte County—CHCO-TV has become a source of reliable, local news and programming and is one of the most followed media outlets in the province. And now we are in a bind.

Facebook has decided to block news content in Canada in response to Bill C-18, otherwise known as Canada's Online News Act. This bill became law in June and requires digital giants like Meta and Google to compensate Canadian news outlets when their content is shared on their platforms. Instead of paying Canadian media outlets, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, just isn't making news available in Canada. Google plans to follow suit, so that means Google searches and even YouTube will be affected. This news block in our country has cast a cloud over the free exchange of information, public discourse, and civic participation and is a direct threat to our democratic values. In light of this, I want to take a moment to highlight how CHCO has effectively and invaluably used Facebook to connect with and inform the community.

Our station's dedication to critical journalism and potentially life-saving information was most recently evident during the Bocabec and Chamcook forest fire of May and June 2023. At a time of crisis, CHCO-TV was the first media outlet in the province on-site, using Facebook as a platform to dispense real time updates and footage. We shared our footage with other television stations to widely disseminate crucial information, never hoarding exclusivity but instead sharing freely the information we had as soon as we had it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CHCO-TV conducted live news updates on our Facebook page in tandem with government press conferences, at times daily, for over two years. These live conferences, streamed on CHCO's Facebook page, drew over 10,000 views per session. During these updates, we were able to interact with our community in real time to find out what pressing questions you wanted to have answered, and we posed your questions to the Premier, Chief Medical Officer and Health Minister. We believe that we first and foremost a community station, and that means keeping the community in the conversation--a tool Facebook, for us, has always been the best platform to use for.

During election seasons, be they municipal, provincial, or federal election, CHCO always conducts interviews with all of the candidates with adherence to strict media guidelines to ensure fairness. We make all of these interviews available on our Facebook page to ensure we reach all voters as not everyone in our community has cable. We are also the only television station regularly covering council meetings in four different communities across Southwest New Brunswick, live-streaming to our Facebook for those who can't come in person.

Facebook's blockade of news content in Canada threatens CHCO-TV's invaluable contributions to our community and ultimately the future of our 30 year old television station. We've evolved with the times, and have been in Ottawa when Canada's own media giants have suggested that social media is somehow the great equalizer, therefore making financial contributions and extensions of carriage to small televisions like ours unnecessary in their eyes. We know what it's like to be stifled by telecommunication giants in our own country, but now foreign entities are censoring our reach on platforms that promised to be the most democratic tools of all.

Canada's media giants already have apps in place to ask you to make the jump with them. We will have one soon, so stay tuned, but for now, I'm asking you to subscribe for free to our YouTube page at @chcotv while its still visible, and also follow me on Facebook, and please write us a letter at news@chco.tv to tell us how much you value CHCO. We will compile them and bring them to Ottawa this fall. And please share this video. Small local media outlets in Canada are being hurt the most by Facebook's news block, and we are afraid of what's to come when Google blocks news in Canada too. It has been and continues to be our greatest privilege to be there for our community for the past thirty years, and right now we are humbly asking you to be there for us.