Meta has postponed new terms of service that would have authorized the company to scrape business clients' websites for data after an outcry from media companies who suddenly discovered that unchecked corporate power is a problem when it's their content on the line. The stakes for ordinary Americans: if the largest platforms can vacuum up whatever they want and build competing products with it, the people who actually create things — writers, businesses, anyone with a web presence — work for free to train their own replacement.
The updated terms, originally set for Oct. 30, would have let Meta use bots and scrapers to "index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs" tied to any business account, according to both the Los Angeles Times and Arkansas Online. Critics said the rules would have applied to all business clients regardless of consent and without compensation — and that Meta could have used the extracted content to build AI products that compete directly with the publishers themselves.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone posted on X that the update was "designed to make sure we're able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites." But after the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard had three legal experts review the language and concluded it "could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company's AI products," Meta quietly removed the word "train" from the terms. Draw your own conclusions about what that word was doing there in the first place.
Here is the rich part: the same institutional press that spent years demanding Big Tech censor disfavored speech, that cheered when platforms deplatformed voices they didn't like, that called for more content moderation and more control — these same outlets are now howling about unfair terms and dominant market position. The Norwegian Media Businesses' Association, whose members account for roughly 97% of Norwegian newspaper circulation, won a temporary injunction from a Norwegian court on Oct. 28. MBL board chair Lene Eltvik Vindfeld said the court agreed "that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable." The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority opened its own investigation Oct. 30, saying it was concerned Meta's requirements "could amount to an unlawful imposition of unfair trading conditions."
In the U.S., no lawsuits have been filed. The Association of American Publishers issued a statement calling on Meta to drop the terms, with AAP president Maria Pallante saying Meta is "implicitly acknowledging that permission is required" to use creative works while simultaneously "abusing its dominant market power by compelling such consent from any commercial user who connects to any of their platforms."
Notably absent from the outrage: any concern about the regular users of Facebook and Instagram whose public posts are already being scraped to train Meta's AI models. The press only mobilizes when the machine comes for them.
Meta said Oct. 29 it was listening to feedback and that existing terms remain in place for now. The open question is whether American publishers will find the same courage as their European counterparts — and whether they'll recognize that the surveillance-and-censorship apparatus they helped build was always going to be turned on them eventually.
