Meta’s new scraping terms galvanize publishers into collective action

Meta’s latest terms, which are set to go into effect on Oct. 30, have accomplished something publishers have historically struggled to do: unite the industry around a common fight against Big Tech’s use of their content.

On Thursday, a number of publisher trade bodies around the world published letters to Meta pushing back on its terms, and urged lawmakers to take action.

The News/Media Alliance, the trade body that represents over 2,000 publishers, sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter on Thursday demanding the company withdraw its revised terms before they go into effect. The organization argued that the changes would effectively force publishers to allow Meta to scrape and use their content without permission or compensation, or risk losing access to the platform’s massive audience. 

The letter, signed by News/Media Alliance’s president and CEO Danielle Coffey, also accuses Meta of abusing its market power, potentially undermining the market for AI content licensing deals and allowing the company to use publishers’ journalism to develop products that compete with them.

“Meta’s behavior risks undermining the robust licensing market for publishers’ content and could allow Meta to simply snatch that content for free,” the letter reads.

Meta’s new terms of use are an unusually aggressive attempt to leverage its platform dominance to secure access to publishers’ content without their permission or compensation, Coffey told Digiday. She argued that Meta is effectively forcing publishers to choose between protecting their intellectual property and maintaining their presence on Facebook.

The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) also sent a letter to Meta on Thursday. It has over 20,000 publisher members in 120 countries.

The Center for Media and Digital Governance (CMDG) at the Open Markets Institute called for regulators in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union to act before the Oct. 30 deadline.

Other trade organizations in Europe filed complaints and joint letters to the European Commission, including:

• The European Publishers Council
• The Movement for an Open Web (MOW)
• The German Association of Free Press and the Federal Association of Digital Publishers 
• Four European press associations, including the European Magazine Media Association, the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the European Press Council and News Media Europe
• The Association of Information Media (AMI) in Spain

Publishers currently have no way to opt out of Meta’s updated commercial terms without giving up access to its business products. While Meta maintains that publishers can block its crawlers through robots.txt files, Coffey said this would mean publishers who choose to do so wouldn’t have their content show up to Meta users. This would also undermine publishers’ ability to advertise and promote their content on its platforms.

“Now our readers can’t access us on Facebook because we haven’t paid their mafia term tax, which is to give them all of our content for free,” Coffey said. “This was a significant overreach, especially for a dominant platform who should know better when they’re forcing terms on the users who have no choice but to accept those terms, and then have the impact be felt by the users who want to receive our information.”

The timing of Meta’s recent AI licensing agreements with publishers leading up to these revised terms is raising questions among publishers about whether paid licensing will remain a viable business model if platforms can claim broader rights through their terms of use. If Meta can scrape publishers’ sites without paying them under these new terms, then it puts into question the existing licensing agreements the platform has with publishers, a senior publishing industry representative told Digiday.

Alex Springer, technical lead at the SPUR Coalition, said it could have simply been tone-deaf overreach from the ads business of Meta rather than a land grab for their bots. But then again, the tech giant just released Muse – which has significantly increased bot traffic almost overnight. “The timing is certainly a bit suspect,” he said. “The idea that those terms could supersede somehow the terms a publisher declares to control their content is mad. Publishers can and should make noise about that. Talk to your Meta account managers. The scope of the original ToS update is egregious, no matter how you look at it.”

In some ways, Meta’s attempt to strong-arm publishers into giving up its content to its crawlers is not unlike Google’s previous efforts to use publisher content to fuel its AI search products. Both are tech giants, both have created platforms that exchange access to publisher content for driving traffic and engagement, and both are pulling publisher content into their AI systems. 

But the timing and transparency are where they differ, Coffey said: Google was more upfront about its AI search features, and while Google’s “Hobson’s choice” of giving publishers the ability to opt out of its AI search products isn’t ideal, Meta has not offered any such feature to publishers yet. Facebook has not guaranteed it will respect robots.txt and not scrape publishers’ content without permission, she added.

“What sets Meta apart is Meta will still say take it or leave it. Waive your right to copyright protection if you want to be found on my platform,” Coffey said. “It’s definitely not good long-term relationship thinking.”

Coffey requested a public response from Zuckerberg to the letter by October 26. If he doesn’t respond, “We’re going to start having to make some decisions. Whatever those decisions are, I won’t go into them because we’re exploring them right now,” she told Digiday. 

Meta did not respond in time for this story’s publication.

Jessica Davies contributed reporting to this story