News publishers deliver letter to Meta demanding it withdraw new harmful terms of use

ARLINGTON, Va. — The News/Media Alliance, the largest news media trade association representing over 2,000 newspaper, magazine and digital media publishers in the United States, delivered a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding the company withdraw its revised Commercial Terms of Use before they take effect on Oct. 30.

Read the Letter.

Uncovered in a piece by Neiman Lab last week, Meta’s updated commercial terms of use will allow the company to scrape content from any website associated with a business account on its platforms. This would give Meta the ability to scrape news sites and use their content to train the company’s business products, including its AI tools. Over the weekend Meta made minor revisions to language within its terms of use, but legal experts say that the terms still grant Meta overly-broad scraping privileges without explicit limitations. 

The letter points out that this move raises serious antitrust concerns, with Meta using its power in social media to extract concessions in the market for licensing news content. Meta harvesting billions of dollars worth of journalism for free would cause severe harm to news publishers by irreversibly crippling the multibillion-dollar market for licensing news to AI developers. By removing publishers’ ability to capture the value of their reporting, Meta’s unchecked scraping would “threaten the financial viability of the free press,” and limit publishers’ ability to employ journalists and continue creating news. 

The News/Media Alliance calls on Meta to withdraw the crawling provision from its updated terms of use before going into effect on Oct. 30. 

Key quotes from the letter:

“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation.”

“Meta’s unilateral conduct, given the scale and reach of its social media platforms, is an exercise of market power and is anticompetitive. Meta’s behavior risks undermining the robust licensing market for publishers’ content and could allow Meta to simply snatch that content for free.”

“Publishers cannot practically disallow or block Meta’s crawlers without harming their ability to promote content as a business account user, which would limit user access to quality journalism content on the platform.”

“If the terms take effect on October 30, they purport to grant Meta the right to exploit, without prior permission or fair compensation, journalism for which, by one estimate, Meta already owes U.S. publishers nearly $2 billion a year.”

“Publishers that cannot capture the value of their reporting will produce less of it: fewer reporters covering fewer communities, fewer investigations, and less original news for the public. This harm will fall hardest on the local and independent publishers least able to leave Meta’s platforms.”