Facebook and Instagram, under the parent company of Meta, threatened to pull all news stories from the platforms if California passes a bill requiring big social media sites to pay news organizations for their content.
In a statement tweeted by Meta Communications Director Andy Stone, the company called the state’s Journalism Preservation Act “disappointing” and a “slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.” The bill, sponsored by Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, would essentially tax the profits that the tech platforms make from distributing news articles. The money would be paid to local news organizations, and 70% of the money collected from the “usage fee” would be invested in journalism jobs to support newsrooms throughout the state.
“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,” Stone wrote.
Instead, Meta threatened to pull all news stories altogether from its platforms should the bill be passed in the California State Assembly.
In response to the threat, Wicks called Meta’s response “egregious” in defense of the bill.
“This threat from Meta is a scare tactic that they’ve tried to deploy, unsuccessfully, in every country that’s attempted this,” Wicks wrote. “It’s egregious that one of the wealthiest companies in the world would rather silence journalists than face regulation.”
The conflict has attracted mixed responses from media organizations. The Media Guild of the West and the Pacific Media Workers Guild wrote a joint letter calling Meta and Google “powerful landlords overseeing an ever-expanding slum of low-quality information” in a plea to committee members to support the Journalism Preservation Act. (We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this post if we hear back.)
On the other hand, media advocacy organization Free Press Action says the bill would “do nothing to support trustworthy local reporting and would instead pad the profits of massive conglomerates.”
This isn’t the first time that Meta has made such a threat. In early 2021, after Australia passed a similar measure requiring tech platforms to pay for news content, Meta issued a statement that Facebook was drawing the line and would restrict the sharing and publishing of news content. In Canada, Google even tested blocking news results if such a measure was enacted.
And it’s not unique to other countries, either: Toward the end of last year, Meta released a similar threat to the U.S. Congress over a proposal that would help news outlets negotiate with tech platforms.
According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, about half of Americans get their news from social media sites, with nearly a third regularly getting their news on Facebook.
The California bill is set to go up for a vote on Thursday.
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