Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is threatening to pull news content in California in response to a state legislative push to make social-media companies pay publishers.
The bill in question is the California Journalism Preservation Act, which would require Meta and other companies to pay a journalism usage fee. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, said if the bill were to be enacted, “we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”
The object of the bill is to give content generators a piece of a social-media company’s digital-advertising pie. An arbitration process would determine how large the payment would be.
In other parts of the country and even in other parts of the world, lawmakers have advanced similar proposals. Tech companies oppose them and argue that they are already generating revenue for the content producers by distributing their content.
“The bill fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves and that substantial consolidation in California’s news industry came over 15 years ago, well before Facebook was widely used,” wrote Stone. “It is disappointing that California lawmakers appear to be prioritizing the best interests of national and international media companies over their constituents.”
The California bill’s sponsor, assembly member Buffy Wicks, argued in a statement to the Washington Post that the threat “is a scare tactic that they’ve tried to deploy, unsuccessfully, in every country that’s attempted this.”
“It’s egregious that one of the wealthiest companies in the world would rather silence journalists than face regulation,” she added.
Australia has passed a similar law and has rererouted an estimated $130 million annually to news outlets from Meta and Google.
A congressional effort to force social-media companies to make payments to news generators, led by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), failed last year after Meta made a similar threat.
Blue states have tried other ways to bring tech companies to heel, with limited success.
Democratic governor Tim Walz of Minnesota vetoed a bill passed by the legislature that would have seen a minimum wage established for ride-share drivers. Walz acted after Uber threatened to pull out of the state entirely.