Meta Threatens to Pull News Content Over Calif. Bill

If California passes legislation forcing social media companies to pay for news content, Meta will remove news from Facebook and Instagram in the state, the company said in a statement Wednesday. State legislators are considering the California Journalism Preservation Bill, which passed at the committee level. Meta isn’t going to pay into a “slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media under the guise of aiding California publishers,” the company said. Legislators fail to recognize that publishers have willfully posted news content on their platforms and that consolidation in the California news industry happened more than 15 years ago, before Facebook was widely used, the company said.