Meta’s new commercial terms allow for web scrapers to access publisher content, sparking widespread backlash.
Digital advertisers and publishers are pushing back against Meta’s new commercial terms.
The new terms for business accounts, due to come into effect on 30 October, would effectively give Meta unlimited rights to use publishers’ content to train its AI services.
The terms state any organisation with an active business account on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp will automatically consent to allow the firm’s web scraping tools to trawl their websites.
The content will then likely be used by Meta to train AI models.
Publishers and advertisers have called on the European Union (EU) and UK regulators to suspend the new terms. Advocacy group, the Movement for an Open Web, has put in complaints to the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and requested interim measures.
Tim Cowen, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, said: “Meta’s new terms are clearly anti-competitive. Many businesses effectively have no choice but to use Meta’s services and these conditions would force them to sign away the rights to their digital content with no means of opting out.”
The CMA reportedly met with Meta to get more insight into the upcoming business terms.
Meta disagrees with the complaint. A spokesperson said: “The crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.
“As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
Publishers have been pushing for fairer use policies on AI web crawlers, which scrape content often without the their knowledge, consent, and without compensation or credit.
The CMA has already compelled Google to introduce fairer terms for publishers, and to provide tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search. The tech giant has now partnered with 400 publications globally on news AI pilot programme.
