Meta Warns That It Will Remove News From Facebook & Instagram In California, Rather Than Pay Buffy Wicks’ Bribes
from the tax-something,-get-less-of-it dept
We’ve written a few times about California’s “Journalism Protection Act” (CJPA) from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, and many times about the terrible concept of such link taxes. Unfortunately, it looks like California’s bill is moving forward, with buy-in from the big media orgs and their journalists that will get the free pay offs from such an unconstitutional link tax.
In response, Meta has now announced (as it has done elsewhere) that if California passes the CJPA it will simply stop allowing links to news media in California. From a statement posted on Twitter by Meta’s Comms boss Andy Stone:
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. The bill fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves and that substantial consolidation in California’s local news industry came over 15 years ago, well before Facebook was widely used. It is disappointing that California lawmakers appear to be prioritizing the best interests of national and international media companies over their own constituents.
Obviously, that statement is a bit self-serving, but this is the only reasonable response to this nonsense (other than to sue to have the law found unconstitutional).
Again, as we’ve detailed many times before, the impact of a tax on an activity is that you get less of that activity. Indeed, that’s often the reason given for taxing certain things. So no one should be surprised that if you tax links, companies that are going to have to pay are now going to decrease the links they allow. And, as is the case with news, where there has been little actual value to companies like Meta (which have long focused on family/friend connections over media), that if they just do a quick cost/benefit analysis of the situation, they’re likely to conclude that it’s just not worth it, and therefore ban links to news sites.
Still, I’m a bit confused by the reaction to this. As happened in Australia, people are attacking Meta over this, which shows an astounding level of entitlement. It’s literally saying (1) you have to allow yourself to be used to promote our news and send traffic to us, AND (2) you have to pay us for letting us use your platform for promotion and traffic. It’s only reasonable for a website to say “uh, no.” To then attack companies for recognizing what a terrible deal that is… is strange.
I’ve even seen some people call it “censorship” by Meta, which makes no sense at all. Here’s Buffy Wicks, the sponsor of the bill, claiming that this is Meta trying to “silence journalists.” I mean, come on.
Will Buffy Wicks let me post Techdirt articles to her website? Or to her Facebook page? No? Why is she silencing me!? Look, a private company choosing not to do the thing you’re going to force them to pay for, which is not providing much value for them, and which should be free… and then having them say “that’s not worth it,” is so far from silencing people as to call into question why anyone should take Wicks seriously on anything.
This is pretty straightforward economics: California is trying to tax something that is free and always should be free (the ability to link). They’re doing it as a favor to news orgs and as a smack down on companies they have made it clear they dislike (Google and Meta). But, if you’re going to force companies to pay for something that is free, don’t be surprised when they do the math and realize it’s not worth it.
Filed Under: buffy wicks, california, cjpa, link tax, links, matt pearce, media, taxes
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta
Comments on “Meta Warns That It Will Remove News From Facebook & Instagram In California, Rather Than Pay Buffy Wicks’ Bribes”
Don't threaten
It feels like Facebook is doing this backwards. Don’t threaten. Just do it. Do it now.
“Due to the imminent passage of CJPA, we are no longer present news in CA” (word choice was intentional, imminent whether or not it’s really close)
Let the constituents pressure BEFORE it’s passed, not after. Most people aren’t going to get off their butts until it directly affects them.
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Take it from an Australian – FB will threaten, then actually do what they threatened to do…only to cave a few months later.
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Yeah, kinda hard to take a threat seriously when you know the one issuing it has done so before and walked back their position once pressure was applied.
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Exactly. Not negotiating with terrorists only works if the terrorists all know you actually mean it.
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Facebook didn’t really cave in Australia – they got Australia to amend the law to something they were happy with – the initial law required Facebook (and Google) to pay every covered news organisation in Australia if they wanted to link to any news, but the law got amended at the last minute to only require them to pay enough covered news organisations to make the Australian Government happy (i.e. News Corp) as well as changing how the payments would be calculated if they couldn’t agree.
Re: Re: Re: Demanding three things and getting two is still winning
Facebook wasn’t paying before, they shut down the ‘offending’ service rather than pay, then after pressure were back to what they were doing before but also paying for it, even if the amount was less than it would have been under the original system.
How is that not folding?
I liken these laws to ones requiring newspapers not only to carry advertising but to pay the advertisers for each customer that comes to their business because of the ads. That… isn’t how any of that works. The only way it might make sense is if the ad itself were a suitable substitute for whatever it was advertising, and if that’s the case the advertiser has bigger problems with their business.
Care to count again?
It’s not so much that she’s wrong about the success rate of Meta’s plans, it’s more about the use of the word “attempted” that shows she does have some knowledge of how this action usually turns out. That she goes ahead and pushes for it anyway, that speaks volumes about her mental acuity. Obviously she hasn’t learned anything from the ongoing court cases over AB5 and Prop22.
Looks more to me like she’s trying to become “Buffy the News Slayer”. Sarah Michelle should sue her for appropriating her public likeness. (That’s a law in California, which would be an outstanding schadenfreude.)
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Could you expand on something for me?
Would this be 2020 California Proposition 22?
And California Assembly Bill 5 (2019)?
Where proposition 22 was passed in response to AB5, and mostly upheld in California appeals court?
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Golden Egg
I’m pretty sure that CA only likes FB and Google insofar as they appear to act as a golden goose. But CA very much views the legacy media as their political allies. A dollar gone to a media org is as good as a dollar to their campaign fund. Politicians rely on news actors and papers to steer elections, so they can’t afford to have them go out of business.
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And this is why no one ever accused you of being intelligent.
Charge for service
Meta could just charge X for posting “advertisements and commercial news” where X equals the cost of the tax. (I admit defining the link posting narrowly enough is a job for the experts)
This would serve two purposes. (1) to neutralize the tax for Meta and (2) make the journalists fully aware of how little money this means they’ll make. Like fractions of a penny.
I think some see these company’s net worth and assume they’ll be a millionaire instantly with something like this.
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Fascinating how fascists are always surprised at fascism happening
The fascist USA somehow always seems surprised when fascism happens. You are a fascist state!!!! Why the big surprise?
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Well, no, y’see, there’s this thing where the system self-corrects for flaming nutjobs. In a fully fascist state, it wouldn’t do that. We are a lot closer than I’d like, though.
But I’ll give you this much – the use of “fascist” here is entirely apt, since it involves the fusion of private interests with government.
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We aren’t surprised. We’re disappointed and frustrated. There is a significant difference.
Nobody at all is surprised that moves like this occur – the first time, maybe, but by now it’s been happening everywhere, outside the US first, in fact.
The only people mentioned as being “surprised” here are those who are pushing the bill, who might be “surprised” to find that all their tax does is reduce online link traffic to news organizations.
Living in this country means that no, we aren’t surprised by it. We don’t act surprised by it either. We are disgusted, annoyed, frustrated, angry, etc. – but not surprised. Surprised went out the window seven or more years ago.
I wonder does this law effect websites like reddit ,meta is right, if it go,s along with this law there,ll be similar laws passed in other states,
this law is against free speech, the right to post a link is a basic part of the internet ,
people should be able to post any link anywhere as long as it is not against the terms of service of the website or social media service .
websites can block meta or google if the wish
I guess American lobbyists are intentionally carbon copying the debate in Canada at this point.
This is probably one of the most infuriating aspects of this debate. Before, the lobbyists would scream that Facebook and Google are “stealing” their news articles and not compensating for their work (to which I simply reply by saying that they are more than welcome to file a copyright infringement lawsuit if they feel that way, yet, mysteriously, they choose not to do this. I wonder why!?)
Then, the moment Meta and Alphabet say they are going to drop news links, the lobbyists scream “OMG! You’re censoring me!!!eleventyoneone”. At that point, I find myself saying, “OK, which is it? Do you want your links on the platform or not? Pick one and stick with it because you can’t have it both ways.”
I’ve already seen lobbyists use both nonsensical talking points in the same breath at times. At this point, I’m getting to the point of calling the passage of such bills the “fucking around” part. Afterwards, when the platforms drop news links, call that the “finding out” part. This hurts me, but all the common sense and reasoning up here in Canada is not sinking in with enough people in power and the large media conglomerates are going to have to learn the hard way about how things work in the real internet world – as ironic as that sounds.
The same will probably end up having to happen in the US because the naked corruption and blatant rent seeking is probably going to move ahead no matter how many logical arguments you throw at the problem. If logic and reasoning isn’t going to get it through their thick skulls, then maybe letting several news rooms metaphorically burn down is the only way to get the message across.
On a side note, let’s just hope that Meta and Alphabet don’t repeat their mistakes in Australia anywhere in North America. They really need to stick to their guns and carry through on their promises like they did in Spain in the 2010s. Waving the white flag for no good reason is only going to emboldened the unapologeticly entitled further in other countries.
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Then, the moment Meta and Alphabet say they are going to drop news links, the lobbyists scream “OMG! You’re censoring me!!!eleventyoneone”. At that point, I find myself saying, “OK, which is it? Do you want your links on the platform or not? Pick one and stick with it because you can’t have it both ways.”
It’s a strange form of ‘theft’ indeed where the alleged ‘victim’ screams about how they’re being further harmed when it stops.
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Exactly! I frequently find myself wondering if some of those lobbyists are actually hearing themselves talking when they make these arguments.
What’s more is that the bad arguments and nonsensical statements only gets worse from there. In one of the hearings I listened to, one of the lobbyists pushing for this bill actually called for the Canadian postal service, Canada Post, to pay fees to publishers as well. This is because the flyers that were distributed by newspapers are now more often distributed by the postal service. So, in response, Canada Post should pay fees because those mean postal workers took away their business and it’s really unfair. I was almost at a loss for words when I heard someone honestly make that argument in a public hearing. I mean, thanks lobbyist, for offering an example of the level of absurdity this whole sorry affair of link taxes has become… I guess?
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They are practicing rhetoric not logic, and the object of rhetoric is to find the words that get others to agree with you.
‘Oops,’ Said Faceberg
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That… is an incredibly misleading comparison.
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How so?
Zuckerberg wouldn’t limit new reporting that was supporting a genocide, but will limit it if it costs him money. All Tengrain’s post is saying is that it shows exactly what kind of sociopath he is (which isn’t news, of course.)
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Yes, corps don’t have a moral compass, but what the fuck is this trying to say, other than that?
I mean, Zuck fucking folded in BOTH instances.
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“Zuck fucking folded in BOTH instances”
Did he shut down the harmful reporting which supported the massacre of Rohingya people? I don’t think he did:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence
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Okay, I might have miscommunicated there.
Zuck gave in to authoritarian assholes. The Myanmar government (and by proxy, China) and eventually paid Murdoch his pound of flesh.
All I see is Zuck is a psychopathic asshole no different from Murdoch. That alone should put him and his corp on a permanent shitlist.
Surely she cares about those journalists too, right?
If ‘Meta refuses to pay our extortion demands and would rather just stop doing the thing we demand payment for, therefore they are silencing journalists’ is how they want to play it then I pinky-promise that if Buffy Wicks gives me several millions dollars per year I’ll totally give some of it to journalists, which means if she doesn’t either do that personally or get the state to do so she’s personally trying to silence those journalists.
HBO Show Based on very rich news Owner..Loosely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxfOARy3_J0
Succession.
Loosely based. And this person has been mentioned on TD a few times. And even the Aussies are getting tired of him.
“Again, as we’ve detailed many times before, the impact of a tax on an activity is that you get less of that activity.”
And that is why there should be a death tax.
Re: does not work
It does not work. Volusia County passed a death tax years ago, and people keep on dying, undeterred by yet another tax here in a famously high-tax county.
Cui bono?
The link tax ostensibly is aimed toward supporting the public face of journalism — the reporters and the audience. The reality is that the law would just take money out of one unsympathetic corporation (Big Tech) and give it to another (Big Media).
Who owns the media in California?
1. Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong (L.A. Times and San Diego Union Tribune)
2. Alden, a hedge fund (Everything in the Bay Area not the Chronicle or the Press-Democrat and everything in Los Angeles not the Times)
3. Hearst (San Francisco Chronicle)
4. Chatham, a hedge fund (McClatchy, based in Sacramento and owner of the three Bee newspapers in the Central Valley, had declared bankruptcy and no member of the McClatchy family has any connection with the business anymore)
5. A stew of hedge funds that own Gatehouse/Gannett (smaller metros such as Ventura County, Stockton, Salinas, Visalia and Redding)
It’s these five that control the bulk of newspaper readership.
As for broadcast, every L.A. and most Bay Area TV stations are owned and operated by the networks. Generally, web traffic is a fraction of their TV viewership. However, news video clips do well on YouTube, which might deactivate official news TV station accounts.
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What's a link?
I’m kind of confused about the wording here. “Link tax” to me implies literally just a Web 1.0 link – i.e., http://www.techdirt.com/some-news-article, possibly with some other link text. Most social media sites now include some of the article’s content, often including an image from the article. From a few quick searches, it’s not clear to me if news sites can opt out from this.
Whether that’s fair use seems to be an interesting legal question that I’d love to see covered on Techdirt. (Maybe it was covered at some point, if so, can someone share a link?) It’s possible that social media links drive more traffic to news sites, but it’s also possible that the presence of snippets disincentives users from visiting or subscribing to news sites.
On the other hand, the “silencing journalists” thing is just total bullshit.
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They just have to check the referrer url, if it’s not from their own site they just stop providing any content. This a simple and common tactic to stop deep-linking for example.
Any site can implement fine grained controls who can access what, this has been true almost from day one when it comes to web-sites.
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There is also precedent in US copyright law that says that taking thumbnails in the way platforms do is fair use (see Kelly v. Arriba, Perfect 10 v. Amazon). IANAL, and I’m not aware of any relevant case law for snippets, but perhaps the same arguments would apply.
Link Tax?
Zelda may not like this.
Um...what?
News orgs 10 to 15 years ago: “hey, we should move everything to the Web! Register with Search engines, and they will bring traffic to us!”
Google/Facebook and the like: “great! We will start sending viewers/users your way!”
News orgs now: “thanks for all that free help, now pay us”
Facebook: “you want us to provide an endless stream of customers, and pay you for the honour? Hmmm…no.”
News orgs: “you censoring bastards! How dare you!”
I have to admit that part of me admires the ability to ask for help with the heavy lifting, and then demand payment for providing the opportunity.