Even as Meta on Tuesday warned to ban news in the US if the government passes a journalism bill that will require the social network to pay publishers for using their content, its Oversight Board suggested a revamp of its system exempting high-profile users from its rules.

Andy Stone, Meta‘s head of policy communications, said on Twitter that if the US Congress passes an “ill-considered journalism bill” as part of national security legislation, “we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to the government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions”.

Introduced last year, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), once passed, will allow news publishers to negotiate with Facebook and Google over the use of their content.

The US Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act in September, but it still has to pass through the full Senate, IANS reported from San Francisco.

Stone said that the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act “fails to recognize the key fact: publishers and broadcasters put their content on our platform themselves because it benefits their bottom line — not the other way around”.

He stressed that no company should be forced to pay for content “users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue”.

“Put simply: the government creating a cartel-like entity which requires one private company to subsidize other private entities is a terrible precedent for all American businesses,” Stone added.

Last year, Facebook pulled news from the platform in Australia over similar legislation which forced it and Google to pay news publishers for content.

It later restored news content to its users in Australia.

Facebook also issued a similar threat in Canada over its Online News Act, which would also require the platform to pay publishers for sharing news.

Oversight Body Recommends Revamp of VIP Rules Exemptions: Meanwhile, Meta’s Oversight Board recommended on Tuesday that the company revamp its system exempting high-profile users from its rules, saying the practice privileged the powerful and allowed business interests to influence content decisions, according to a Reuters report.

The arrangement, called cross-check, adds a layer of enforcement review for millions of Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to celebrities, politicians and other influential users, allowing them extra leeway to post content that violates the company’s policies.

Cross-check “prioritizes users of commercial value to Meta and as structured does not meet Meta’s human rights responsibilities and company values,” Oversight Board director Thomas Hughes said in a statement announcing the decision.

The board had been reviewing the cross-check program since last year, when whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed the extent of the system by leaking internal company documents to theWall Street Journal.

Those documents revealed that the program was both larger and more forgiving of influential users than Meta had previously told the Oversight Board, which is funded by the company through a trust and operates independently.

Without controls on eligibility or governance, cross-check sprawled to include nearly anyone with a substantial online following, although even with millions of members it represents a tiny slice of Meta’s 3.7 billion total users.

In 2019, the system blocked the company’s moderators from removing nude photos of a woman posted by Brazilian soccer star Neymar, even though the post violated Meta’s rules against “nonconsensual intimate imagery,” according to the WSJ report.

The board at the time of the report rebuked Meta for not being “fully forthcoming” in its disclosures about cross-check.

In the opinion it issued on Tuesday, the board said it agreed that Meta needed mechanisms to address enforcement mistakes, given the extraordinary volume of user-generated content the company moderates each day.

However, it added, Meta “has a responsibility to address these larger problems in ways that benefit all users and not just a select few.”

It made 32 recommendations that it said would structure the program more equitably, including transparency requirements, audits of the system’s impact and a more systematic approach to eligibility.