Meta’s AI grab meets resistance, presenting an opportunity for news media publishers

Treat the delay as cover to work, not a reason to relax.”

Jon Accarrino

Is Meta’s audience and referral traffic worth the training data it wants from your sites? That is the issue every media company is now debating. Nearly every newsroom, in broadcast, radio and print, runs a business account on a Meta account like Facebook or Instagram. Meta’s updated terms that would let the company use web scrapers and bots to crawl any domain “associated with” those accounts and feed the content into its products, including its AI systems. There is no opt-out, and the license reaches reporting on your own servers, not just content you upload or share using Meta's platforms.

That was already a lopsided deal. Now it is a political fight.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, said the update could harm the businesses and creators who depend on Meta’s platforms. She argued the terms indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts. California Democrat Adam Schiff has written to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well, insisting the company withdraw the terms as they are currently written.

Blackburn is pressing the same weak point legal scholars flagged when Meta first published the terms. Under pressure, Meta removed the word “train” from its Oct. 16 revision but left “develop” intact. Attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab that “develop” is broad enough to include “train.” Blackburn said the language still authorizes extensive scraping of external sites and lets Meta develop its business products with collected content.

Her intervention gives publishers something they have not had before: a federal lever. It turns a contract dispute into a question of consent. If Meta can train models on the journalism of local newsrooms and deploy them to generate competing summaries, publishers can argue Meta is using their own intellectual property to undercut them, a potential hook for the FTC or the DOJ, regulators who have shown a willingness to examine AI-training practices under existing antitrust frameworks. The industry’s collective pushback now has reach beyond the courtroom.

The Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association, a coalition of major Norwegian publishers including public broadcaster NRK, filed the first lawsuit against Meta over the terms, and a Norwegian court then blocked the terms from taking effect on Nov. 20, until it could assess their legality. Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, the association’s board chair, said the court agreed that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable. The European Publishers Council has also signed onto a joint letter to the European Commission arguing the terms violate the Digital Markets Act, and EPC director Angela Mills Wade said any consultation must lead to binding contractual safeguards: “Publishers must retain control over additional uses of their content, including for AI, and the ability to negotiate licenses and payment.”

What the delay buys you

Meta has moved implementation from Oct. 30 to Nov. 20 to consult with publishers and advertisers. Meta vice president of communications Andy Stone said the company is committed to getting this right and said it would not make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders, and that it could delay implementation beyond Nov. 20 if needed. Until then, the existing terms remain in place. Meta insists the update applies only to its ads and business products and that it is not changing how it uses web crawlers.

After Stone’s tweet on Oct 28, Blackburn pushed back. A vague promise to consult, she said, is not nearly enough; Meta must commit to meaningful changes that protect the intellectual property rights of American creators.

So, what should you do?

Treat the delay as cover to work, not a reason to relax. Don’t reach for the obvious fix: robots.txt files tell Meta’s crawlers where they can go, but it’s not a strategy, and carries no legal weight.

The tools that actually control machine access are at the CDN level. They verify which crawler is hitting your site, catch scrapers hiding behind real browsers, and block the ones you do not approve. There are several options at different price points to choose from. But because Meta’s terms were written to authorize crawling, a block can sit in a contested legal zone, so have counsel review your access policy before you harden it.

The real play is not just defense

Meta’s move signals a new reality: AI systems can consume news content at machine scale, with or without a signed contract. The counter move is not only blocking access, it is pricing it. Platforms now let publishers treat machine access as a priced product, a subscription for human readers, a licensing agreement for approved AI partners and metered, charged access for unlicensed bot crawlers.

Google already pays roughly 100 publishers for AI-sourced answers. Meta will not volunteer a cent, so the licensing layer has to be built rather than requested.

That is the work for the next several weeks. The question I opened with, whether Meta’s audience is worth the training data it wants from your site, is not answered by deleting your account. It is answered by blocking the crawlers you do not approve, licensing the access you will allow and pressing the fight collectively. With a Norwegian court freezing Meta’s rollout, European publishers pressing for binding safeguards and two U.S. senators demanding the terms be withdrawn, the pressure campaign now reaches where the courtroom cannot. Use the extra time from these delays wisely.

Jon Accarrino is an award-winning media executive and AI innovator driving digital transformation across the media industry. As founder of Ordo Digital, he helps media companies worldwide turn artificial intelligence into new revenue, more efficient production, and stronger monetization. Named “Digital Innovator of the Year” by the Local Media Association, Accarrino is known for putting AI to work across broadcast, radio, print and digital media.