CNN
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Meta, the mum or dad corporate of Facebook and Instagram, threatened to take away news from its social media websites in California if the state passes a bill requiring giant tech firms to pay news shops for his or her content.
In a observation posted on Twitter, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, known as California’s Journalism Preservation Act “a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers.”
“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 mentioned.
The bill, backed via Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, calls for virtual firms similar to Google and Facebook to pay native news publishers a “journalism usage fee” every time their news content is used or posted on the ones platforms. The bill additionally calls for news publishers to make investments 70% of utilization price earnings into journalism jobs.
“This threat from Meta is a scare tactic that they’ve tried to deploy, unsuccessfully, in every country that’s attempted this,” Wicks mentioned in a observation. “It’s egregious that one of the wealthiest companies in the world would rather silence journalists than face regulation.”
According to a spokesperson for Wicks, the bill is due for a vote in the California State Assembly on Thursday.
The bill has garnered reward from one of the vital biggest journalism unions in California, together with Media Guild of the West and Pacific Media Workers Guild. In a joint letter, the 2 unions called Meta and Google “powerful landlords overseeing an ever-expanding slum of low-quality information, happy to collect advertising rents from struggling tenants while avoiding paying for upkeep.”
However, the bill additionally has its detractors. Free Press Action, a non-profit media advocacy group, has criticized the bill as doing “nothing to support trustworthy local reporting and would instead pad the profits of massive conglomerates.”