In a warning issued yesterday (Wednesday, 5/31), Meta claims it will pull news links from Facebook and Instagram in California if lawmakers in The Golden State move forward with a bill that would tax the company for news content. The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would require online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” to news providers whose work appears on their services. Under the measure, an estimated 70% of the money collected from that fee would support newsrooms throughout California. Meta argued the bill will aid out-of-state companies and says if the Journalism Preservation Act is enacted, it will remove news from Facebook and Instagram altogether. While the bill has been praised from some of California’s largest journalism unions such as Media Guild of the West and Pacific Media Workers Guild, non-profit media advocacy organization Free Press Action has criticized it, per CNN, as doing “nothing to support trustworthy local reporting and would instead pad the profits of massive conglomerates.”
