Why Facebook is threatening to ban all news from its platform

For many people, Facebook is the chief source of information in today’s world. But in a statement Monday, Meta threatened to pull all news off its flagship social media platform.

It was a shot across the bow that confused a lot of users. At its heart is a bill making its way through Congress, which Meta and Mark Zuckerberg feel diminishes the value the social media platform provides to news outlets.

Andy Stone, Meta’s policy-communications director, issued the warning on behalf of the company, saying that if Congress passed the “ill-considered journalism bill,” the social media outlet “will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether.”

“The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line—not the other way round,” he continued. “No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue.”

Obviously, media outlets such as this one, that are writing about this bill and Meta’s response, may have some inherent biases. But a Pew Research Center study from last September seems to poke a hole in Stone’s argument that users don’t want to see the content.

That study found that just under half (some 48%) of U.S. adults said they got news from social media “often” or “sometimes.” And “when it comes to where Americans regularly get news on social media, Facebook outpaces all other social media sites.”

The center of the storm

There are two bills driving this action by Meta, both called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). Meta has a problem with a key provision, which would force Facebook (and all other social media platforms) to compensate publishers and broadcasters.

Amy Klobuchar, senior senator from Minnesota, introduced the most recent version of the bill with bipartisan support this year. It would let publishers negotiate with social media outlets about how their content is distributed and give them the right to require those platforms to pay for it. However, while the bill has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, that happened back in September. Since then, it has not been passed by the full chamber.

The House had its own version of this bill last year that went nowhere.

A lifeline appeared Monday, however, after the bill was added to the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress needs to pass by the end of the year to keep the military funded.

The 117th Congress ends on January 3, 2023, and while there are opponents to the JCPA, the heart of the bill has always had bipartisan support. With the changes to leadership coming at the start of the next Congress, this could be the bill’s last chance for a couple years.

Major media outlets with more than 1,500 full-time employees, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, would not be eligible for payouts. Illinois senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee and cosponsor of the JCPA, noted the bill is meant to benefit local news organizations.

“Local news is essential to keep our communities informed, especially during times of crisis,” he said in a statement upon the bill’s passage in September. “But with the dominance of Big Tech platforms like Google and Facebook, many small and local journalism outlets are going out of business. This bipartisan bill will help preserve high-quality, local journalism by allowing news organizations to negotiate in good faith for fair compensation from the tech giants profiting from the use of their content.”

The history of news and social media

Social media has changed how news gets distributed in the modern world—and tech companies were, not long ago, supporters and allies of news outlets.

In 2015, Facebook launched a feature called “Instant Articles” that displayed news from several external outlets on the platform, giving 100% of the ad revenue to those outlets. Recently, though, Facebook has announced plans to phase out that initiative, saying it will be gone completely by next April.

That has spurred news outlets to lobby legislators to force social media outlets to pay for their content. That effort has seen success in Australia, where Facebook (and others) were forced to pay. (Facebook briefly blocked access to news stories there, but ultimately changed its mind after the bill was amended.)

The U.S. bill isn’t the only one on Meta’s radar, either. Both Canada and New Zealand are considering similar bills, which could put the social media giant on the hook for even more potential payouts—or news bans.

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