Manitoba voters less informed of election happenings due to Meta's decision to block news, experts say

If the only news you're hearing about the Manitoba election comes from Facebook and Instagram, you could be led to believe Progressive Conservative Leader Heather Stefanson has cut health care at every opportunity and NDP Leader Wab Kinew will defund the police.

Neither is accurate.

Finding the truth is becoming harder since Meta pulled news content from Facebook and Instagram in response to federal legislation demanding tech giants pay news outlets for posting their journalism on their platforms.

It means voters who usually got their news over social media might be missing key moments from the campaign trail. 

The election in Manitoba is Canada's biggest since the news ban fully came into effect in August.

"You're losing a significant source of valid, legitimate news, and that makes the decision-making [for voters] much more difficult," said Daniel Tsai, a communications lecturer at the University of Toronto.

Algorithms support opinions: Tsai

The election content surfacing on those social media platforms are posts and advertisements from the political parties themselves and the opinions of your friends and family, Tsai said.

Partisan messaging can get amplified at the expense of factual and unbiased information, he said.

"An algorithm can accentuate people's prejudices, their biases, and actually make them more ill-informed, because they're just being fed content that supports their opinions but not necessarily supports the truth."

In a statement, federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge continued to slam Meta's decisions to yank news from its platforms as an "unfortunate and reckless choice."

"Facebook is showing how they don't want to be a relevant platform to help voters make informed decisions during elections," St-Onge said.

The federal government's Online News Act requires big tech giants like Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms. The government said the legislation was introduced because the tech giants have captured advertising revenues that news outlets traditionally relied on.

Companies like Meta and Google have countered that their platforms help news organizations reach broader audiences with their stories. Meta has said the only reasonable way to comply with the bill is to end news access in Canada.

A Meta spokesperson directed CBC News to its previous statements. 

Mary Agnes Welch, a pollster with Probe Research in Winnipeg, wonders if Meta's actions dampen the impact of the near-daily announcements from the political parties.

"Stuff doesn't get shared. Parties find it a lot harder to get their message out, their promise of the day," Welch said.

Voters may have trouble deciphering who's telling the truth, she said.

"I think it leaves people in the dark a little bit."

While legacy media is still reporting on the election, "it's kind of a campaign from, like, 1997," Welch said, explaining how voters have to seek out fact-checked perspectives, if they even bother.

Valentina Timofeieve, a 37-year-old voter, has had to search for information on the parties and candidates running in her constituency, Rossmere.

"I feel that I don't have a lot of information," Timofeieve told a recent focus group Probe Research put on, in collaboration with CBC Manitoba. "The real information that I get is the pamphlet from my candidates that they throw into my mailbox."

Welch said the political parties have to spend lots of time in front of voters, which they were going to do regardless because of how tight the election is.

For their part, Manitoba's three main political parties say the news ban isn't impacting their campaigns. 

"We've always been a party that talks directly to voters and that's what we're going to continue to do," Progressive Conservative spokesperson Shannon Martin said in an email. Martin, the MLA for McPhillips, isn't running for re-election.

The NDP is working hard to reach Manitobans "using all means available, and we know the message that it's time to change government is being heard," spokesperson Rebecca Widdicombe said in a prepared statement.

The NDP was briefly directing social media users to its website, where it posted small blurbs from news articles it wanted to share. It stopped that practice in August.

Earlier this month, the PCs on Instagram boasted about an opinion piece that criticized the NDP. The party quoted the headline and two sentences, but didn't provide a link to the newspaper article or acknowledge it was an opinion, rather than a news story.

Manitoba Liberals spokesperson Colin Roy said that party, too, is talking to constituents directly whenever possible.

Roy said the biggest issue with Meta's news ban is that "the only communication is partisan communication, which means there is no fact-checking about other parties' claims." 

• Read full coverage of the 2023 Manitoba election here

Ahmed Al-Rawi, an assistant professor at the B.C.-based Simon Fraser University's school of communication who specializes in news and social media, said it's too soon to say what impact fewer people consuming election news coverage may have.

Another wrinkle, he said, is younger generations are increasingly getting their news on TikTok, where bite-sized videos, sometimes no longer than 30 or 45 seconds, are the norm. Sharing nuanced policy through those means is difficult, Al-Rawi said.