Meta Opposes California Bill That Would Require Fee for Journalism

Meta will remove news from Facebook and Instagram if it is forced to pay for it by a California bill.

If the state’s Journalism Preservation Act passes, it would create a “slush fund” that would benefit big media companies and that Meta would refuse to pay into, according to a company statement that Meta Policy Communications Director Andy Stone shared in a Wednesday (May 31) tweet.

“The bill fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves and that substantial consolidation in California’s local news industry came over 15 years ago, well before Facebook was widely used,” the statement said. “It is disappointing that California lawmakers appear to be prioritizing the best interests of national and international media companies over their own constituents.”

The proposed California legislation would require online platforms to pay a fee to news providers whose content appears on their platforms, Reuters reported Wednesday.

The author of the bill, State Assembly member Buffy Wicks, said in a March 20 press release that it will require big tech companies to pay publishers a “journalism usage fee” when they use local news content and sell advertising alongside it, and will require publishers to invest 70% of the profits from the fee in journalism jobs.

“These dominant digital ad companies are enriching their own platforms with local news content without adequately compensating the originators,” Wicks said in the release. “It’s time they start paying market value for the journalism they are aggregating at no cost from local media.”

The bill is supported by the 800-member California News Publisher Association (CNPA), which said on its website that it advocates for quality journalism, free press and fair compensation for locally produced news.

Meta has also opposed similar efforts at the federal level and in other countries, according to the Reuters report.

These include a bill in Congress that is similar to the one in California, and proposed legislation in Canada, the report said.

A similar bill passed in Australia in 2021, leading Facebook to first threaten to curtail its service in the country, and briefly shut down its news feeds there, but then negotiate a deal with Australian media companies, per the report.

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