WASHINGTON—Bipartisan legislation aimed at helping smaller news outlets band together to negotiate payments from big internet platforms has become tangled in partisan sniping about content moderation, potentially dimming its chances of becoming law this year.
The bill, known as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, would create a baseball-style arbitration process enabling smaller publishers to negotiate for compensation when technology giants such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google use their content.