Canada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.
Canadian news might've been easier to replace with American news outlets due to the deep ties between the two and the shared language. I doubt this would be the case for Italian news.
No, ads make them money. Users see the ads because they view their feeds.
It’s been proven in other markets that removing News from the feed doesn’t decrease engagement. Meta will continue to make money, and Italian news sites will see their traffic vanish.
Turns out they’re simply not valuable in the way they used to be, and country after country is learning this
Meta does this in Canada. These same media outlets need to be funded by the government to survive, and as such treats the government with kid gloves, very little criticism, deflection, bias etc.
So I’d say that deal is working well for both the legacy media & the Canadian government.