In a tweet, Andy Stone, head of communications, Meta said that Facebook will be “forced to consider” removing all news from its platform “if Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation.”
Meta says that Facebook will not be willing to submit to government-mandated negotiations that “unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions.”
What is Facebook’s problem with the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act?
In the tweet, Meta says that the Act completely fails to “recognise the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line – not the other way around.” Meta says that no company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue. The Act, as per Facebook, if passed will set a terrible precedent for all American businesses.”
The Act, as per reports, will give news publishers an edge over tech companies like Facebook and Google, which have become a big source of news for many users across the world. If the bill is passed by the US Congress, then Facebook could be made to pay for hosting news on its platform — something that it is clearly not comfortable with. Similar laws were floated in Australia and Canada and even then Facebook threatened to remove news content from the platform. However, in the case of Australia, Facebook banned news content but later brought it back when a similar law was amended.
