After all, this is the company that became the world’s avatar for shameless and exploitative data harvesting. The same data mastery that powers one of the most effective advertising platforms ever made also gave us Cambridge Analytica, whistleblowers like Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn-Williams, and unflattering films like The Social Dilemma and, just this month, The Social Reckoning. In the Axios-Harris Poll 100, Meta scored a lowly 59.6, down in the basement with ByteDance and X.

Publishers have their own reasons to be suspicious. Meta once vastly increased the reach of its properties, and even paid them for content, then abruptly took it all away when its priorities shifted. Meta has blocked news entirely in Canada since 2023, and briefly did the same in Australia in 2021.

The new terms, which allow Meta to use automated tools to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” websites “associated with” a business account, and to use that content to “provide, develop, improve, research, train” Meta products, could be interpreted as signing over to Meta the license to do whatever it wants with your content, including training its AI models or even offering up AI answers based on it. Indeed, three legal experts Nieman Lab consulted warned publishers of exactly that danger.

Meta quickly backpedaled, sort of. Within a day, it removed the word train and limited scraped content to its advertising and business products. ” That didn’t calm anyone down. Legal experts said the revised language still permits mass scraping, and publisher groups on both sides of the Atlantic demanded a pause and filed complaints with regulators.

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