Canadian authorities rejected India's allegation that they had suspended the social media pages of The Australia Today following an interview with India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and a joint press conference with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, which India suggested demonstrated Canada’s hypocrisy regarding freedom of speech.
The Canadian foreign ministry stated that the inability to view the outlet’s social media content was due to Meta’s policy, which restricts the sharing of news across its platforms in Canada, The Wire reported.
This policy, which affects all news outlets, was implemented by Meta in August 2023 in response to Canada’s Online News Act (C-18), designed to compel companies like Meta and Google to pay news publishers for shared content.
Meta’s move to block news content in Canada followed after the law passed, leading to a shift in how news is accessed on platforms like Facebook and Instagram in the country.
Despite this official clarification, The Australia Today maintained that its social media posts were restricted under the “orders” of the Canadian government. This message was accompanied by a screenshot showing the notification that Canadian users could not access its content.
However, the full message, which was not included in the screenshot, pointed to Meta’s policy of responding to Canadian legislation, rather than a direct government-imposed restriction.
The issue escalated when Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj, the founding editor of The Australia Today, explained that the outlet had first learned about the block from Canadian readers after publishing the interview with Jaishankar.
Bharadwaj noted that The Australia Today had not been aware of any issues regarding accessibility in Canada prior to the interview’s publication. Furthermore, he pointed to the ongoing availability of a Canadian news website, Baaz News, on Facebook and Instagram as evidence of potential selective enforcement by Meta.
While Baaz News continued to be accessible, The Australia Today and other outlets were blocked across these platforms.
This raised concerns about whether Meta was enforcing its news-blocking policy inconsistently or whether additional factors were influencing the platform’s actions. Bharadwaj emphasized that his goal was not to assign blame arbitrarily but to question the selective nature of the block, which appeared to disproportionately affect certain media outlets.