(New York) The California assembly passed a text requiring major social networks to pay news media for content shared on their platforms, despite Meta’s threat to dispense with these articles, photos and photos altogether. and videos.
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.
Called the California Journalism Preservation Act, 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 the advertising revenue generated by the social network to be paid to the producers of online journalistic content.
He also argued that publishers were self-uploading their articles and videos on social media, and pointed out that California’s media consolidation 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 considered 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 “undemocratic and outrageous,” the US News Publishers Association, the News/Media Alliance, and its equivalents for California publishers said in a statement.
