Facebook parent Meta on Wednesday indicated it would remove news items in its home state of California if the state legislature passed legislation requiring tech companies to pay publishers.
The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would mandate “online platforms” to pay a “journalism usage fee” to news providers whose work appears on their services, with the goal of reversing the local news sector’s decline.
In a tweet, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone branded the payment system a “slush fund” and said the law would only benefit “big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”
The remark was Meta’s first on the California measure in particular, while the business has been fighting similar disputes over remuneration for news publishers at the federal and international levels.
Stone stated in December that if the United States Congress implemented legislation similar to the proposed California legislation, Meta would remove news from its platform entirely.
In response to proposed laws in Canada, the business is threatening to pull news, as is Alphabet’s Google, which has warned it will remove links to news stories from Canadian search results.
The ideas are comparable to a groundbreaking law established by Australia in 2021, which prompted threats from Facebook and Google to limit their services.
After revisions to the legislation were offered, both corporations eventually reached agreements with Australian media companies, however the standoff resulted in a brief outage of Facebook news feeds in Australia.