Patrick McKendry

Earlier this month, Facebook began blocking users in Canada from seeing news content on its sites and apps. The change is in response to the passing of the Online News Act in Canada and part of Meta’s growing efforts to distance itself from the conversation around news and content moderation.¹ The new Canadian law, Bill C-18, would require major platforms like Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content that is shared on the platforms. This is not Meta’s first rodeo as the platform employed a similar ban tactic in Australia when that country proposed similar legislation to Canada in 2021. Meta, Google, and the Australian government were able to rewrite a mutually workable proposal back then, but many experts expect Meta to be particularly difficult in its dealings with Canada given its proximity to the United States market.¹ News organizations are furious with the change, citing it as uncompetitive.¹ Public ministries called the change reckless as it limited awareness around critical news, such as evacuations related to the recent Canadian wildfires.¹ Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen also noted that the ban was worrying for shifting the balance of current event content in the platform’s algorithms away from legitimate news sites and towards more conspiratorial non-news organizations that are not represented in the bill.¹

For Meta, this is just another step to get as far away from news content as possible. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, noted that “Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” It is easy to see why hard news no longer seems worth the strain. An internal analysis from Meta in March showed that news content only accounts for 3% of Facebook feed content.³ Further, as more engaging TikTok-style video content becomes increasingly readily available, the platform is less dependent on news headlines to keep people scrolling. Rather than facing charge after charge of censorship, it is easier for Meta to adjust its content serving algorithms to limit or exclude news altogether. The impacts of that decision are far from balanced, with news outlets seeing referral traffic drops by 40% or more.² Still, regardless of whether or not Meta wants to be a source of referral traffic for news publishers, the fact is that consumers look to social media for news. Pew research findings on American social media preferences show that roughly ⅓ of Americans get their news regularly from Facebook. Further, of its user base, approximately half say they regularly get their news from the platform’s feed.⁴ Yet, only 4% of consumers report that Facebook is the most important way by which they get their news.⁵

The situation is resultingly ironic. News publishers, Meta, and consumers alike all want to find alternative methods for sharing news content off of the social media platform. But each, for their own reasons, seem unable to move past the current interlocking construct. Analyzing the deadlock, we are once again reminded of something that psychologists know all too well - behavior change is hard. For their part, Meta seems ready to jump to a new world and may even hope for the long-term success of Bill C-18 as key to their exit strategy. For publishers and consumers, the path forward is less clear. Here, we take a look at Berkman’s neuroscience-based review of behavior change and discuss how “the will” is creating problems for consumers and “the way” seems like a blocker for publishers. In this example, we can find parallels to how and why change management unravels for our teams and why entrenched behaviors consistently seem impossible to overturn.

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If No One Likes News on Meta, Why Can’t We Leave It Behind?

Most of us realize the difficulties of behavior change. Whether it is a new year's resolution, a renewed energy for healthier eating, or trying to set aside time to learn a new skill for our careers, it can be hard to update our operating rhythm. The challenges of behavior change help explain the wide disconnect between how people feel about the low value of news content on social media platforms and how people actually engage with news content on social media platforms. There are multiple forces that make it difficult for us to simply step away. Psychology and neuroscience researcher Elliot T. Berkman, Ph.D breaks those forces into two categories that have distinct pressures, activate different systems of the brain, and are fixed with different tactics - the “will” and the “way”.⁶

The Will

Berkman describes the “will” as the motivational aspects of behavior change, describing why we want to change and what makes the change important to us. The problem with motivation is that it does not last. Think about how often we get energized at the prospect of establishing a new behavior only to have that motivation evaporate as we get underway. In his research, Berkman describes how motivation is not an isolated emotion but is actually intertwined with reward value.⁷ Said differently, we tend to be motivated to display behaviors that reward us physiologically with dopamine or otherwise with extrinsic motivation factors like a salary bonus. Berkman notes that this actually creates a problem for behavior change because we only have ever received rewards for things that we have historically done and not for things that we would like to start doing. This means that new idealistic behaviors are going to be less motivating as we start doing them than just simply continuing to act the way that we always have.

This struggle is likely one that we are all familiar with when using social media at this point. Much has been said about the dopamine addiction many of us have today thanks to social media and its availability via our smartphones.⁸ Digital tech companies have built their business models around user engagement and have become masters at rewarding behaviors that keep users active on their platforms. As Meta, publishers, and consumers all try to shift news consumption off of social media they collectively need to fight the addiction, or motivation, of continuing to repeat existing behaviors. Other outlets, such as television or print outlets, lack the tools to create reward values for consumers in the same way. Without that, consumers will have to spend willpower seeking out the less motivating behavior rather than following the default option. For their part, social media companies could help accelerate the shift away from sourcing news on social platforms by simply making the content less engaging. While some features - like the ability to “Like” a post - may be necessary for determining which news to surface to which people, taking away the ability for users to “Comment” on posts could remove the strongest reward mechanisms that the platforms have to offer and decrease the motivating force of existing behaviors.

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The Way

Berkman notes that rarely is solving for motivation enough. When motivation inevitably falters, it is helpful to have a plan on which you can fall back. In Berkman’s framework, the “way” describes how behavior change occurs and includes defining the skills to be developed and the plan for developing those skills.⁶ This is easier said than done because - from a neuroscience perspective - skill development requires executive function, the conscious processing and guiding of tasks.⁹ Executive function stands apart from habits because it requires attention. In terms of development, this is an issue because our attention is finite, meaning that we can only focus on one goal or activity at a time. Any skill that we want to actively develop comes at the expense of attention spent on something else. With a developed plan for the “way” we will pursue behavior change, our attentional requirements are diminished because we have a plan we can reactively follow.

As news publishers try and woo readers away from social media, this is largely where their plans fall apart. Simply put, publishers have no plan to replace the content discovery capabilities of social media platforms. There is no plan that publishers can hand to their followers to say “Follow these steps in order to get your news not on Facebook.” Further, with all of the goals and dreams we each have for ourselves, the attentional investment of finding a different news discovery mechanism is unlikely to be prioritized by the readership en masse. Many publishers built, or at least accelerated, their businesses on the back of the social media boom. Disentangling scrolling behaviors and readership now poses a daunting task that may require an equally monumental shift in consumer preferences for how they receive content.

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Changing Behaviors in Our Teams

For leaders, change management is an important part of the role. Organizations, on the whole, want to change and grow to stay ahead of their competition. Leaders must become change experts in order to navigate one evolution after another for their teams.

Berkman’s explanation of the “will” highlights some key things for leaders to remember. Because existing behaviors have a motivational leg-up over new behaviors, leaders have to be especially mindful to celebrate when they see their team display the new behaviors. I generally favor positive reinforcement for its precision and ability to build a healthy culture, and the benefits it can offer are particularly impactful for motivating behavior change. Additionally, this motivation can be reinforced by establishing social connections around the new behavior. For example, a leader may establish a recurring team L&D series or topical “office hours” so that the individuals on their team are not trying to learn a new skill in isolation. That social component is not only good for accountability. The interpersonal component can be motivating and encourage behaviors that promote, in this case, focused skill development.

Still, it is important that leaders also include a plan for the “way” to deliver the change. For individual behavior change, the IDP (individual development plan) is one of my favorite tools. I have written in depth about these tools before but they are highly effective for both planning and follow-through. An effective IDP, should focus on one or maybe two key opportunity areas and detail specific behavioral tactics and their frequency. Berkman’s framework helps to increase the resolution on why that structure is important. Executive function is limited so we need to be definitive in our trade-offs for where to focus. And the “way” should be well-articulated so that we can easily follow the plan when motivation drops.

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Conclusion

Just as behavior change can be unpredictable, there is really no telling how Meta’s shift away from news content will play out. Driving behavior change for an individual is no small feat. Managing behavior change for a team takes deliberate planning and consistent follow-up. The complexity of having to coordinate such a change across millions of content consumers more or less guarantees that the effort will fail without considerable thought and coordination across groups. The most likely path for Meta’s outright exit is something similar to this news ban. Still, we should keep ourselves honest that this change does little more than punt responsibility to either another party or into the future. Social media shares some characteristics with Pandora’s box - personalized news recommendations and highly engaging online dialogue around it will likely never go away now that we have seen it. Figuring out a sustainable model for digital news content creation and distribution will be hard, but that also makes it worth doing.

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References

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Bill C-18 & The "Will" and The "Way" to Behavior Change