Facebook parent Meta has threatened to remove all news from its social media platform if an “ill-considered” journalism bill designed to help publishers passes.
This warning was directed at US lawmakers, who are attempting to pass a similar news media bargaining code as the one that passed in Australia last year.
“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” Meta said.
Facebook famously removed news from its platform for several days last year, a protest against legislation moving through parliament at the time that would require Facebook to negotiate payments with publishers.
Meta is currently threatening to do the same thing in Canada, where a similar media code is being considered.
It seems the days of the platform playing ball with media bargaining codes are over.
In early November, Meta informed Australian publishers it will soon be reverting to automated news content and removing all human editors.
“Along with European curation deals expiring, we plan to end our in-house curation of Facebook News in Australia by the end of the year,” Andy Hunt, Meta Australia’s news partnership boss told local media at the time.
Hunt claimed the move would “have no impact on our commercial deals”, but this seems unlikely given how hard Meta is fighting similar legislation in the US and Canada.