Facebook’s empty California threats
Conn Carroll
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Facebook wants you to believe it will pull out of the state of California entirely if it is obliged to start paying a fair price for the journalism produced by others.
“If the Journalism Preservation Act passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.
This is not the first time Facebook has made such an empty threat.
Before Australia passed a similar law in 2021, Facebook issued a similar statement and actually tried to follow through … but for under a week, until the company caved.
The California Journalism Preservation Act is bipartisan legislation first introduced by state Assembly member Buffy Wicks (D-CA) earlier this year. For years, monopolists such as Google and Facebook have captured almost all the advertising revenue produced through the consumption of online journalism.
Wicks’s bill would require Facebook, Google, and other internet platforms to use binding arbitration to determine a fair percentage of advertising they would have to share with the news organizations that actually produced the content they profit from.
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“You’re not going to convince me that Google isn’t profiting off the backs of journalists,” Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-CA) told the Los Angeles Daily News. “They need to pay for the content they’re profiting off of.”
A vote has been scheduled in the California Assembly for June 1.