The C-18 news block

In June 2023, Canada passed the Online News Act, known as Bill C-18. The idea: when big platforms carry links to Canadian news, they should pay Canadian news organizations for the value those links create.

The two companies covered by the law made opposite choices:

• Meta blocked news instead of paying. Since August 2023, Facebook and Instagram remove or hide links to news, from Canadian AND international outlets, for everyone in Canada. No news in your feed, no news in search, no sharing an article with your group chat.
• Google made a deal. Google pays roughly $100 million a year into a fund (the Canadian Journalism Collective) that distributes money to Canadian newsrooms. In exchange, Google was exempted from the law, and Canadian news still appears normally in Google Search, News, and Discover.

• The Meta block is still in effect. In December 2025, Canada’s telecom regulator (the CRTC) said it plans no regulatory action against Meta for blocking news links.
• In early 2026, Ottawa and Meta confirmed they were talking about restoring news, with the government signalling flexibility on the law. Those talks are tied up with broader Canada-US trade discussions, and nothing has changed for users yet.
• Google’s payments are flowing: distributions to more than a hundred Canadian outlets began in 2025 and continue under a five-year agreement.

Here is the strange part. In 2026, social media overtook television as Canadians’ number one source of news (53% versus 49%, per the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report). So the country’s most-used news channel is one where the biggest platforms deliberately carry no journalism. What fills the gap on those platforms is commentary, screenshots, and rumours, with the original reporting stripped out.

The same report found 45% of Canadians now actively avoid the news at least sometimes, and trust in news sits at 37%, the lowest ever recorded here. Blocked journalism and rising avoidance are not a coincidence: when news arrives as noise, tuning out is a rational response.

• Go direct. The block only affects Facebook and Instagram. News sites, news apps, newsletters, podcasts, and Google surfaces all work normally in Canada.
• Pick one or two trusted entry points instead of relying on whatever a feed happens to surface. A morning newsletter, a news app, or a bookmarked front page beats algorithmic scraps.
• Support the reporting you use. The whole C-18 fight is ultimately about journalism being expensive to make. If an outlet earns your attention regularly, a subscription is the most direct fix available to anyone.

Full disclosure: we build one of those entry points. Crsp summarizes the day’s stories from 60+ trusted sources in sixty words each, Canada first, and every card links to the original reporting. It exists precisely because getting news in Canada should not depend on a platform’s standoff with Parliament. You can also read today’s brief free at getcrsp.ca/today.