Facebook blockage? What blockage?

Nunatsiaq readers continued to like our news coverage in 2024, even without being able to give it a thumbs-up on Facebook.

Last year, Nunatsiaq News had more than two million visits to its website — 2,053,421 to be precise. We also had nearly four million page views over the year.

Those numbers are reassuring, considering that 2024 was the first calendar year since Facebook began blocking news organizations like us, as well as Canadian users, from sharing news stories.

You’ve probably seen it — when you try to share an article, you get the not-so-friendly message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.”

It’s the social media platform’s response to the Online News Act, a federal law that took effect in 2023.

When the Liberal government brought in the law, the goal was to help Canada’s newspaper industry cope with the effect of online giants like Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and Google that make money partly based on the popularity of news content shared on their platforms.

Companies that share Canadian news now have to contribute to a fund to help compensate the news organizations that produced the content originally.

Facebook took its ball and went home. Rather than share a piece of the pie, it decided not to allow Canadians to post news articles on their account. This has had a devastating effect on the news industry, as it took away a major platform which referred readers to media websites.

Google went the other direction and negotiated a deal with Ottawa to provide $100 million a year to be split up among eligible media, including — we expect— Nunatsiaq News. Google’s money will support news gathering and will likely help some news media survive.

When Facebook started blocking its Canadian users from sharing news articles, we were nervous about the impact it would have. Facebook is king in Canada’s Arctic.

Before August 2023, Nunatsiaq News posted every article on its Facebook page. People clicking on a news article because it showed up in their Facebook feed accounted for about one-quarter of Nunatsiaq’s website traffic.

That’s how they had become accustomed to getting their news.

In August 2023, we asked readers to bookmark Nunatsiaq News and to come to our website directly, instead of relying on articles to pop up in their Facebook feeds.

They must be doing that, based on the numbers for 2024. We’ve held our own, with online readership that was almost exactly the same after Facebook’s block as it was before.

Our most popular 2024 stories got between 15,000 and 50,000 page views.

Readers found the year’s biggest news stories, whether it was protests over a police shooting in Salluit, the emergency landing of an Air France flight in Iqaluit, Nunavut’s devolution agreement, a Nunavut hockey team declining an Arctic Winter Games medal, or kayakers charged with breaking wildlife laws.

Nunatsiaq News is lucky to have a talented team of hard-working reporters and editors dedicated to gathering and sharing the news about Nunavut, Nunavik and Inuit living in southern Canada.

And we’re particularly fortunate to have readers who will take the extra step to find our news.

We would love to be able to use Facebook to deliver your news, like we did before 2023. Maybe someday Facebook will have a change of conscience, and will act to support local journalism rather than hinder Canada’s news industry.