Instagrammers, you’ve probably noticed that @TheTyee has gone dark since Meta brought in its block in July.

A shame because we’ve racked up over 14,000 followers and pointed many of you to our pages for the first time. It’s also where you got to peek into our newsroom and tag along with our reporters in the field.
Not only have the accounts of The Tyee and Canadian news outlets been shut out of Instagram, no one in Canada can share links to our stories either. Users desperate to do so have tried URL shorteners, from Bit.ly to NewsProxy, but even they are unable to bypass Meta’s firewall.
Why is this? Since the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, the results from a bill that was meant to prop up an industry facing mass layoffs, social media rife with disinformation, the rise of unreliable AI content, the war on journalism, and more — have been mixed. Google was set to ban news but managed to strike a deal at the 11th hour, and Meta has no plans of going back on its news ban on both Instagram and Facebook.
Diving into the New Year with all this uncertainty, it’s likely some newsrooms feel the ground shaking beneath them. We feel that too.
And yet, our journalism is being widely shared on Instagram anyway, from old-fashioned screenshots and paragraphs plunked into the captions. Some of you have even created your own images with our logo and headlines with creative graphics to boot.

We’re still making videos! Though the Reels we used to post on Instagram now live mainly on TikTok @the_tyee. We’ve introduced you to people like a young union organizer that took on Starbucks and brought you to cool places like Kitsault, a ghost town abandoned in a mining bust. While we can’t share Reels anymore, we encourage you to follow us over on TikTok so you don’t miss out on our video storytelling.
With some 19 million active Instagram users in Canada, we know it has become a space where many of you hope to find reliable information communicated in visual ways.
Thanks for keeping us alive on the platform. Here’s a sample of what we’ve noticed you doing.
The shout out:

The screenshot:

The story in a nutshell:

The spicy quote:

The cover story:


Thanks for getting creative in the name of sharing independent journalism, no matter what government legislation, Big Tech or other red tape gets in the way. This 2024, we’re going to continue to provide the storytelling worthy of those very efforts.
This article is part of an occasional series on how Canadian media became intertwined with major tech platforms, and how it’s affecting Canadians and their access to journalism.
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