Meta has created an internal team that will be tasked with blocking news content from its platforms, should the the Online News Act become law.

During a hearing before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on Monday, Rachel Curran, head of public policy in Canada at Meta, said the team will remove news content from Facebook and Instagram,

Bill C-18, also known as the Online News Act, is an attempt by lawmakers to regulate “digital giants” (namely, Google and Meta) and get them to share a greater portion of their advertising revenue with news publishers. However, the act would not directly regulate revenue from ads appearing on a publisher’s own website – policy experts previously told MiC that attempting to directly regulate Google and Meta’s larger ad networks would require an anti-trust investigation with participation from several jurisdictions.

Instead, the bill’s language targets large platforms that “make news available to Canadians,” such as through search engines or link sharing, and instead dictates that these platforms would have to enter negotiations with news outlets for a fair share of revenue. As such, a spokesperson for the Minister of Canadian Heritage told MiC that, should a company no longer share news links on its platform, the bill would no longer apply.

Meta has previously threatened to do just that if Bill C-18 were to pass in its current form, echoing actions it briefly followed through on, before stepping back, in Australia when similar legislation passed there. Meta reversed its block in Australia after changes to its law meant the company was no longer targeted by it; during the hearing, Meta execs said if that were to change, it would enact similar measures there as it is planning for Canada.

During the hearing, Curran said the team at Meta is specifically working to avoid mistakes that were made in Australia, such as messages from government pages and emergency services getting caught in the block. She emphasized that the decision was a purely economic one, and not a comment on the value of news to society – with news making up less than 3% of content on the platform, the company would not have a financial incentive to keep it on the platform, should Bill C-18 pass.

“If we are being asked to compensate news publishers for material that has no economic value to us, that’s where the problem is,” Curran said.

Earlier this year, Google also began its own public test of how it might go about blocking news content, should the bill pass.

Kevin Chan, global policy director at Meta, said before the committee that the premise of Bill C-18 was flawed – not based on the fact that its language does not directly target the sources of Meta’s ad revenue, but rather because the company “does not benefit unfairly from people sharing links to news content on our platform.”

“Publishers choose to share their content because it benefits them to do so, whereas it isn’t particularly valuable to us at all,” Chan said. “We’re not Google. They are an amazingly successful company that does extraordinarily useful things for people, but they operate a search engine that functions by using links to news web pages. Meta, by contrast, doesn’t solicit, need or collect content from news websites to put on our services.”

Chan’s time in front of the committee was largely spent reading prepared remarks that were originally intended to be delivered by Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta. Clegg had originally been scheduled to appear before the committee, but pulled out when the title of the hearing was changed to “Tech Giants’ Current and Ongoing Use of Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Across the World.”

Through Chan, Clegg’s statement said that publishers benefited from the “free advertising” they receive for content posted on its platform, estimating it to be worth $230 million in the last 12 months.

However, MP Chris Bittle was among those that pushed back on the claim, categorizing it as misleading, based on the fact that once a user is directed to a news story, the company’s “monopolistic practices…takes the vast majority of ad revenue so that free advertising is worthless.”

Bill C-19 is completed its second reading in the Senate last month and is currently in front of the Committee on Transport and Culture.