California votes to force social networks to pay for information

The California assembly adopted a text obliging the major social networks to pay the news media in exchange for the content shared on their platforms, despite Meta’s threat to do without these articles, photos and videos altogether.

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Passed by a large majority on Thursday, the bill, submitted by elected Democrats and Republicans and intended to support local journalism, is now being examined in the State Senate.

Titled “California Journalism Preservation Law,” it sets several criteria that limit its application to a small number of powerful platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

It provides for an arbitration mechanism which would define a percentage of advertising revenue generated by the social network to be paid to producers of online journalistic content.

If the text is enacted, “we will be forced to withdraw information from Facebook and Instagram rather than feed a slush fund that would mainly benefit large media outlets based out of state (of California) under the guise of helping publishers Californian press”, warned, on Twitter, Andy Stone, spokesperson for Meta.

He also argued that publishers were self-uploading their articles and videos on social media, and pointed out that media consolidation in California predated the rise of Facebook.

In 2021, Facebook briefly blocked news articles on its site in Australia after a similar law was passed, before the Meta subsidiary and Google agreed to make deals with news publishers and pay them.

An equivalent text is currently being examined by the Canadian Parliament. Again, Meta threatened to remove all links to journalistic content if the law were passed.

In France, an agreement was concluded in 2022 between Google, publishers and press agencies to allow information content displayed in the results of the famous search engine and on other services to be subject to remuneration.

The text examined in California provides that at least 70% of the income received by publishers should be devoted to editorial work.

Meta’s threat is “anti-democratic and unworthy”, reacted in a press release, the American association of press publishers, the News / Media Alliance, as well as its equivalents for Californian publishers.

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