Facebook has been making a lot of noise lately about the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) – a bill to level the playing field between behemoth tech platforms and your local broadcasters and news publishers. The bill would give local TV and radio stations the ability to jointly negotiate with Big Tech platforms regarding the terms by which their content may be accessed. Why is Facebook – a company whose $300 billion market cap dwarfs the entire broadcast industry – so afraid of this bill?
It’s curious that they have launched an all-out assault against the JCPA, trying to bully Congress and the American people by threatening to remove local news. We’ve seen this playbook before, like in Australia when Facebook blocked news in response to potential legislation to address market power imbalances between dominant tech platforms and news publishers, all for their own political advantage.
Whistleblower documents and testimony allege that the social media giant deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to take down pages – allowing swaths of the Australian government and health services to be caught in its web just as the country was launching COVID-19 vaccinations.
The goal, according to the whistleblowers, was to exert maximum negotiating leverage over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the first law in the world that would require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content.
In response to the JCPA in the United States, Facebook is now threatening Americans’ access to news content. And though different groups have attempted to manufacture political opposition by claiming that the JCPA would benefit liberal media or conservative media, the fact is that neither side is advantaged. The legislation does not set the terms of payment; it merely requires dominant tech platforms to negotiate fairly with news outlets.
Do Americans really want Facebook’s scare tactics to work, while it fails to compensate trusted local broadcasters and news platforms for content? Stand up for local news in your community: learn more about Big Tech’s dangerous media dominance and tell your members of Congress to support the JCPA.
