Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms (META.O) announced on Wednesday that it will stop publishing news in California if the state implemented laws requiring digital companies to compensate publishers.
Aiming to reverse a loss in the local news industry, the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would compel “online platforms” to pay a “journalism usage fee” to news providers whose work appears on their services.
The payment system was referred to as a “slush fund” by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a tweet, who also said that the measure largely benefited “big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”
Although the firm has been fighting similar battles over paying news publishers at the federal level and in other nations outside of the United States, this was Meta’s first remark, particularly on the California measure.
If the U.S. Congress passes a measure that closely resembled the proposed California legislation, Stone stated in December that Meta would completely remove news from its platform. Along with Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google, which has declared it will delete links to news stories from Canadian search results, the corporation is also threatening to stop publishing news in Canada in reaction to legislation that has been proposed there.
The ideas are comparable to a groundbreaking law that Australia approved in 2021, which also sparked threats to limit service from Facebook and Google. Despite the dispute resulting in a short outage of Facebook news feeds in Australia, both businesses ultimately reached agreements with Australian media companies after proposed changes to the law.
According to a study from the Australian government that was published in December, the measure had generally succeeded. A request for comment regarding the California law from Reuters was not immediately answered by Google.
