A recent paper by the Media Ecosystem Observatory — a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto — offers an initial glimpse into the effect of the Meta news ban. National news outlets lost about 64 per cent of the engagement previously generated by users on their Facebook pages, the preliminary research shows. Local news outlets lost about 85 per cent of their Facebook engagement, the study says, and almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban.