Facebook’s parent company, Meta, publicly threatened to remove all news content across its platforms if the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) were to become law.
Company spokesman Andy Stone on Monday tweeted a statement from Meta warning: “If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions.”
Meta did not mince words when it came to how it saw its relationship with news outlets. The JCPA “fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line—not the other way around. No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue,” Stone added.
The bill was first introduced by Minnesota’s Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar and received the bipartisan backing of over a dozen other lawmakers, CNN reports. The JCPA would give social-media platforms a four-year grace period during which they could negotiate with news outlets to share advertising revenue.
Meta and other large-social media platforms are not alone in opposing the JCPA.
Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Wikimedia Foundation have signed a letter addressed to congressional leaders arguing that the bill would make efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation worse.
The situation is reminiscent of a 2021 Australian law that prompted Facebook to briefly bar news content across the social-media site. Facebook ultimately backed down from its threats and decided to enter into negotiations with news outlets including the Guardian and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
“Facebook has re-friended Australia,” said Josh Frydenberg, the country’s treasurer at the time, upon the company’s reversal.