Joe Rogan misrepresents Canadian online regulations

"The Canadian Online News Act prevents people from sharing news links on Facebook and Instagram," claims a February 22, 2025 X post from Rogan.

Rogan said he was responding to criticism about comments he made about freedom of expression in Canada on his popular podcast (archived here). He points to legislation which he claims forces technology companies to pay news outlets and prevents users from sharing links.

The post was liked more than 32,000 times and also jumped to Facebook in screenshots.

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Screenshot of an X post taken February 27, 2025

AFP has previously fact-checked comments by Rogan and his guests -- sometimes about Canada -- and exaggerated claims about restrictions on Canadians' freedom of expression. The claims about the country's Online News Act are similarly misleading.

The law (archived here) requires social media and search companies to make commercial deals with news outlets to host their content, but does not prevent people from sharing news links. While the legislation's stated aim was to support the Canadian news sector with payouts from platforms, Meta responded by blocking news on Facebook and Instagram in August 2023.

"The Online News Act did not force Meta to remove news, that's simply not part of the legislation," said Ariane Joazard-Bélizaire, a spokeswoman with Canadian Heritage, which sponsored the bill. 

A public post from Meta details its termination of news availability in Canada on Facebook and Instagram to comply with the law while also questioning the legislation's premise (archived here).

The statement called the law "fundamentally flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work."

"Our position on the Online News Act has always been that it misrepresents the relationship between platforms and news publishers," said Meta spokeswoman Julia Perreira in a February 26, 2025 email.

AFP is one of the independent third-party fact-checking organizations that partners with Meta to counter misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

News block impact

After protracted negotiations, Google -- the other platform large enough to have obligations under the Online News Act -- eventually came to a deal with Ottawa and paid out Can$100 million (US$69.6 million) to Canadian news outlets in January 2025.

"Meta has chosen not to go that route, so it's not the act itself that prohibits the link," said Aengus Bridgman, assistant professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University (archived here).

On the one-year anniversary of the Meta news block in August 2024, Bridgman and his colleagues at the Media Ecosystem Observatory published a brief detailing the effects of the company's move (archived here). Bridgman said that while news links are blocked and many news organizations' pages are not visible in Canada, they found users still share news either through screenshots, repackaged graphics or copy-and-pasted text from articles. 

"Many Canadians still post news," he said. "The censorious thing doesn't hold water for me."

But despite residents employing workarounds to share current affairs, Bridgman said Canadian media saw a dramatic loss in engagement without Facebook and Instagram.

'Exaggerated' claims

Rogan's claims about Canada's level of censorship are emblematic, Bridgman said, of a trend of online influencers discussing Canadian responses to complex national issues, while missing important context.

Anaïs Bussières McNicoll (archived here), director of the Fundamental Freedoms Program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), said Rogan's claims about censorship in Canada, were "exaggerated" but that her organization is monitoring efforts which could limit freedom of expression.

She said the CCLA is concerned about interventions around protected speech such as protest and found the Online Harms Act -- also mentioned by Rogan -- posed a risk to free expression online.

The Online Harms Act was part of Bill C-63 -- tabled in February 2024 -- and aimed to regulate harmful content online (archived here) 

The bill was heavily scrutinized for its proposals' free speech implications and the government already said it would be splitting off parts of the legislation before Canada's parliament was prorogued in January 2025.

It could be reintroduced when Parliament returns in March, but with a federal election set for October 2025 at the latest, McNicoll said she sees very little chance of any version of the legislation progressing before Canadians head to the polls.

"The general understanding is that nothing is impossible, but this bill is probably dead," she said. "But it will all depend on which next government is elected."

While McNicoll acknowledged value in protecting vulnerable individuals from harmful content, she said vagueness in some of the bill's definitions and social media operators' obligations for such content raised concerns about how the legislation could be applied.

"If you're expanding not only the duties, but also the categories of harmful content that are covered by the act, you're creating a risk that social media operators will censor more speech than what is necessary and users won't have the necessary transparency to know why speech has been removed," she said.

Rogan also pointed to coverage of a proposal (archived here) in Bill C-63 that could lead to an individual being issued a "peace bond" over a hate propaganda offence or hate crime they had yet to commit.

The CCLA said it opposes the idea of limiting "someone's expression and liberty if there is a fear that they might commit an offence motivated by hatred" and recommends those proposals not be enacted (archived here).

Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.