Meta has refused to enter into new deals with Australian media publishers for the use of their content on Facebook, leading to fears it may again implement a ban on news content appearing on the platform. But an analysis of Facebook data suggests engagement with posts from news organisations is already at an all-time low, as memes fill the space.

Meta has argued that news makes up just 3% of what people engage with on its services.

An analysis by Guardian Australia has determined that this appears to be by design, with Meta turning off the tap for news in the past few years.

A study carried out in 2021 by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney and RMIT looked at the amount of engagement with Facebook posts by Australian news organisations over time.

It showed a decline in engagement between 2015 and November 2020, as well as a decline in traffic from Facebook to news websites.

Guardian Australia has updated this analysis, which shows that engagement with posts from Australian media is now at an all-time low, with the exception of the brief period in February 2021 when Facebook blocked news posts in Australia.

This drop in engagement and traffic was due at least in part to changes Meta made to its algorithms, which resulted in less news being shown in the home feed of Facebook users. But the UTS and RMIT analysis also shows some publishers changed their approaches to social media in response, focusing on different sources of traffic, such as Google search.

James Meese, one of the RMIT researchers in the 2021 study, says the updated research shows that news on Facebook has continued to underperform on the platform since 2017.

“Another way to say underperformance is just to say that news on Facebook is dead,” he says.

He says Meta has long been public about not being interested in news but that position also affects whether people consume news on the platform.

“There’s probably a feedback loop here where Facebook deprioritises news, therefore people see less news there, therefore potentially seek out news less,” he says.

“Social media and the internet more generally is a competitive space, so if Facebook aren’t surfacing news, then people who look for news are likely to go elsewhere and the practices are going to change accordingly.”

News engagement completely tanked

In a separate analysis, Guardian Australia categorised the top posts relevant to Australia on Facebook by total interaction, comparing the period of the news ban with the week preceding it, as well as the same period in 2015 before any algorithmic changes that deprioritised news in home feeds (see below for full details).

This analysis suggests that when news is removed from the platform in Australian feeds it is replaced by more of the same content that was otherwise in the top 100 – namely memes and posts from content creators.

There is also a live experiment – Canada – that suggests what Australia might experience if Meta pulls the plug on news again. Meta has banned news content in Canada since August in response to its legislation to force Meta to pay for news.

Aengus Bridgman of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Canada says smaller local news outlets have suffered from a reduction in engagement, while the platforms themselves have experienced little change.

“The short story is, Facebook and Instagram are fine,” he says. “They haven’t really seen a noticeable decrease in traffic.”

His analysis of the ban suggests it has had little effect on people who were the subject of news stories or consumers of news on Facebook.

“Politicians, political influencers and the chattering class continue to use the platform and continue to receive similar levels of engagement as to what they received before.”

But he says it has completely tanked news engagement.

“In particular, small community pages and Indigenous community pages that largely relied on Facebook to drive traffic to their websites. All of that link traffic has disappeared. And it’s been disastrous for them.”

News outlets can continue to post on Facebook under the ban but it is not visible to Canadian users. Links to Canadian news sites cannot be posted. Bridgman has found politically focused Canadian groups that previously posted links have shifted to posting screenshots of news stories.

“The political discussion has just continued on the platform. The news cycle still drives engagement. Politicians and influential political personalities still draw on the news … But there’s just none of that linking,” he says.

Some Canadian-based outlets such as the rightwing site Rebel News have adapted by focusing on global news and picking up traffic from outside Canada, he says.

Smaller publishers in Australia have warned that they would similarly be most affected by a Facebook news ban if Meta was designated under the news media bargaining code – meaning the company would be forced to negotiate with publishers and pay for news content on its platforms, or face fines of 10% of its annual Australian revenue.

Some news organisations, such as Sky News Australia, have already tailored their online news output to appeal to audiences in the US and the UK.

The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, last month said he was awaiting advice from Treasury and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about the effect of changes on news outlets and the social platforms while considering whether to designate Meta under the code.

Meta has maintained its position that news is not the reason people use its services, and has said “global tech companies cannot solve the longstanding issues facing the news industry”.

Notes

Guardian Australia used Crowdtangle to export the top 100 posts by total interactions for pages with an Australian admin, and the top 100 posts for pages “relevant to Australia”. These datasets were combined for each time period, duplicates removed, posts in languages other than English removed, and the content type of each page was manually assessed into categories. The final chart uses the percentage of posts in each category.

The time periods used were 18 February 2021 to 26 February 2021 for the “news ban dates”, then the same dates in 2015, 2021 and 2024, as well as the week preceding the news ban in 2021.