California Assembly ignores Meta’s threat, votes to pass the Journalism Preservation Act

One day after Facebook parent company Meta threatened to remove news content from its platforms if Assembly Bill 886 becomes law, the California Assembly voted 46-6 to advance the bill to the State Senate.

“I’m not interested in a debate between Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg,” said bill author Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, in support of her legislation. “...Free press is in our Constitution, and it is at risk right now.”

Wicks accused Meta of threatening to take its ball and go home because of her bill.

“To me this is an empty threat, because these are companies that have made billions and billions and billions of dollars while our newsrooms are shutting down,” Wicks said.

In her concluding remarks, Wicks said that “doing nothing is not an option.”

AB 886 would require social media companies such as Meta, Google, Twitter and others to pay a percentage of their advertising revenue — to be determined by arbitration — as a “journalism usage fee” to news organizations producing content that is shared on their platforms.

Those news organizations would be required to spend 70% of those funds on journalists and support staff.

The bill is intended to shore up California’s struggling media outlets, including ethnic media and media serving so-called “news deserts.”

The bill is co-sponsored by the California News Publishers Association, of which The Sacramento Bee and other McClatchy California newspapers are members.

“When local newspapers shutter, civic engagement goes down, corruption goes up, and the ability to combat disinformation erodes further,” the CNPA wrote in a statement of support for the bill.

Also backing the bill is the California Labor Federation, which released a statement of support Thursday, as shared on Twitter by Los Angeles Times journalist Matt Pearce, who has advocated for AB 886 as president of the Media Guild of the West.

“Like all workers, journalists’ labor produces value. News workers win their fair share of it through collective bargaining with employers, as protected by the National Labor Relations Act. But, if that value is unfairly captured by third-party tech websites instead of the news publishers that employ journalists, these workers cannot bargain for pay that reflects their actual economic productivity. Meanwhile, newsroom jobs keep disappearing,” wrote the labor group’s Mitch Steiger in the letter.

Meta has argued in opposition to the bill that that the journalism industry’s hard times predate the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, and that news makes up less than 3% of most Facebook users’ feeds.

“If the Journalism Preservation Act passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Meta said in a Wednesday statement.

One lawmaker who voted in opposition to the bill was Assemblyman Heath Flora, R-Ripon, who said that AB 886 “is a precedent that I don’t know if we should cross.”

Another lawmaker, Assemblyman Josh Hoover, R-Folsom, said that the bill could lead to tech companies suppressing news stories.

The bill now goes to the Senate.