Facebook May Soon Become News-Free In The US As Meta Threatens To Pull The Plug

Meta is very keen on making its leading app Facebook news free as the company announced today that it could soon be pulling the plug.

The tech giant sent out threats related to the app in the US as it is very unhappy with the new law that gives local media outlets more power to take a share of news content shared on the app’s feeds.

The news comes after such a law had been passed in nations like Australia which led to a temporary suspension of the sort in the previous year.

Moreover, Meta could be seen mentioning and boasting how it is doing a great job at enhancing traffic toward various struggling media outlets.

It hopes publishers start to understand how content is placed on this app since it provides them with all sorts of benefits.

The current law in discussion at this moment is called the JCPA was first outlined by Minnesota’s Congress and had even received plenty of bipartisan support along the way.

This ends up providing publishers and some broadcasters with some intense powers to create deals with various social media apps to attain bigger shares of advertising revenue.

Remember, media firms are not backing down with their own claims against Meta. They feel the latter manages to churn out huge sums of revenue through news content that’s shared on the app.

During stressful times like the Pandemic, so many local news firms really struggled as tech giants such as Meta benefited from huge gains in profits. But Meta argues how such a narrative could be wrong and hence mentioned that Meta diverts traffic toward the right sources.

Meanwhile, we’ve got Meta’s spokesperson mentioning how Congress manages to pass out a journalism bill as an integral component of the legislation linked to national security. And hence that would be forced when considering the removal of news content from the app as a whole.

Then we’ve got Meta sending out arguments related to how news sharing through its platform on Facebook only gives it a fraction of the revenue.

When something similar was passed in countries like Australia last year, it was shocking to see Meta respond by shutting down Facebook in the country to deal with the matter. But when there was immense criticism around the globe regarding such behavior, it was left with no choice but to get back on board.

Read next: New Law May Soon Force Google And Meta To Pay Local Media Outlets For News Published
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World