“It’s an interesting experience to be editor in chief of a news organization and yet locked out of your own news account and prevented from accessing the great work your teams produce for the platform every day,” Fenlon told Vox in an email.

So you make content directly for instagram and not because you have journalistic integrity and a story to tell?

“It also gave me a real glimpse of what the future might look like if Meta and Google make good on their threats to drop news from their platforms in Canada,” Fenlon said. “Our focus now is to ensure Canadians know where else they can go to get CBC journalism should they be suddenly cut off by Meta or Google, including by raising awareness of our free news app and websites.”

Oh no! I have to do the marketing myself!!! The horror!!!

The new Canadian law is modeled on a controversial Australian law, the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which went into effect in 2021. Google and Meta’s responses to that law were similar threats to pull links, but both companies ended up making payments to some news organizations. The Australian government estimates that news outlets got AU$200 million, although it doesn’t know that for sure — nor does it know how that money was distributed — because the companies were allowed to keep those figures private. Even so, other countries, like Canada, likely assumed they’d get similar results with similar laws and were less apt to take Google and Meta’s threats seriously.

So it actually DOES work?

I fail to see the issue.