SB 686: What does Facebook owe the press?

Some members of the Oregon legislature are trying to exact rents from social media companies to create a slush fund to pour some sugar on favored local journalism. What wrong are they trying to right?

Look no further than the Salem Statesman Journal to see the wrong. Something has gone terribly wrong with my local paper. For years now, its readers get one, maybe two, articles a day about Oregon, often days-old content shared from OPB. The rest is just an outlet of USA Today.  This is not unique to Salem. It’s a national phenomenon. The local press is a hollow shell of its former self.

Did Facebook do this? No. People just don’t read much anymore.

Instead, the narrative is that Facebook profits from sharing these newspapers’ content. SB 686 is positioned as giving local media their fair share.

The notion that Facebook unduly profits from anything a local news organization does is a stretch. Newspapers can put their content behind a paywall. For example, I’m a regular reader of the Economist magazine. If I share a link to an article on social media from the world’s greatest news publication, only fellow subscribers can read it. Williamette Week is free to do the same. Instead, they choose to make their articles free. And if sharing local news was such a windfall for social media companies, why have they long designed algorithms to minimize its visibility in your news feeds? They’d rather you share pictures of your family and cat videos. That’s where the money is, because that’s where the sustained user engagement is.

Let’s then get to the real reason local news is suffering. People’s attention has been gravitating elsewhere. Local newspapers struggle for the same reason bookstores struggle. People just don’t read like they used to.

With a false diagnosis of the problem, policies like SB 686 are little more than a shakedown of successful media companies to fund transfer payments to unsuccessful media companies. That certainly benefits people working at a legacy outlet, but the proponents of this bill cannot claim that erecting what is effectively a tax on the likes of Facebook will make Oregonians more informed.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.