Facebook Pulling All News Off Its Platform?
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Facebook aka Meta has turned itself from a college social media app into a global media conglomerate but is now threatening to pull all news from the platform. This new move is being proposed due to a congress looking to pass the new media-competition bill, which would require Meta to compensate publishers and broadcasters. Meta has stated that should this “ill-considered journalism bill” be pushed forward, the company “will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether.”
This new bill was proposed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar and has since held bipartisan support, and would effectively allow publishers to strike their own deals with social media companies like Facebook and Google, to determine how their content is displayed on those apps. However, Facebook has stated that the news provided by publishers has been placed there by those publishers, and users of the app should not have to pay for content they do not wish to see. This new bill would effectively allow any publisher to force social media apps to pay for news content.
This is not the first time that Facebook has removed news from the app, as it battled Australian authorities against a similar bill back in 2021, which resulted in Facebook not allowing users to view, share, or interact with news content. This led to people worldwide not seeing news displayed by Australia and blocked pages for fire departments, emergency services, food banks, and many other crucial organization pages that see a lot of traffic on the app. The same would happen if the US Congress passes this new media-competition bill.
Facebook news has become something of its own kind of animal, and in regard to the organizations that use it to communicate to the public, we would argue Facebook has become far more important for that reason alone. This new bill would cause detrimental damage to local communities that rely on Facebook to connect to people in their immediate area and around the world. So far, the new media bill has passed in the Senate Judiciary Committee but has not yet passed in the chamber.
Facebook has become a monster in the news world, with certain companies and media outlets relying specifically on their audiences that frequently use the social media app. It would be quite a fiasco to see the biggest social media app in the world remove all its news content, especially considering the massive number of companies that use the platform for their own promotions. We would imagine that if the news was removed, a ton of companies would be forced to try and fight or push back against this new bill.
Mark Zuckerberg is also a man that is quite tenacious, so we would imagine that he would fight in court for this bill to be removed, should it pass both the house and senate floors in the coming weeks. Facebook has become a huge player in the world of news and everything else imaginable for sports, entertainment, and everything pop culture related and beyond. Should all that news be taken away suddenly, it would crash many businesses around the world, so we doubt that Facebook would allow this to happen.
