‘They hold us hostage’: Publishers furious over terms change still can’t quit Facebook

Meta recently announced it would consult with industry groups and leaders before updating its terms, but that has done little to pacify publishers. Several publisher trade groups Digiday spoke with, including the News Media Alliance, Digital Content Next, and The Professional Publishers Association, said they hadn’t yet been in contact with them.

In a video posted to LinkedIn, Tami Hoffman, director of public policy at The Guardian, warned that some publishers may ultimately decide to abandon Meta’s platforms over the company’s updated terms of use.

“Policy moves slowly, and some publishers may take the tough decision to come off these platforms altogether. This issue is filling up my inbox,” Hoffman said in the video.

That possibility is already weighing on publishers as they watch to see if Meta makes changes to its terms or provides detail on how publishers can opt out, according to Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of Twenty-First Digital, an audience development and marketing consultancy for publishers and brands.

“The ones paying close attention are still asking questions about whether Meta traffic is worth the trade-off. Now they just have more time to make that call. I suspect if the terms don’t change, we’ll see several publishers move off of Meta. Hard to say how many that would be,” she said.

But internally, the situation is more complicated. 

And that’s because Meta’s value to publishers is not really its referral traffic anymore. Heads of audience at three publishers told Digiday Meta’s social platforms are still crucial for other audience development and business strategies: branded content, paid media, reach, engagement, awareness, and connecting with community. They aren’t ready to cut ties, putting into question how much leverage publishers really have in their fight against Meta’s AI scraping terms.

One head of audience said the publisher had deprioritized Facebook after traffic from Meta’s platforms fell from accounting for more than a fifth of its global traffic to a negligible share. But Instagram remains an important platform for brand awareness, community engagement and marketing rather than referral traffic, they said.

“Meta Zero is already here,” the head of audience said.

When analyzing social traffic to the top 10 publisher websites (including The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, People, BBC, AP News, CNN, USA Today, Fox News and CNBC), Facebook traffic was down 5% year-over-year, according to Similarweb data shared with Digiday.

Meta’s platforms accounted for an average of 3.47% of global publisher traffic in July 2026, according to Chatbeat’s most recent data, which includes over 2,500 domains.

The head of audience said they didn’t think it was likely they would remove themselves from Meta’s platforms. 

“They hold us hostage,” they added. “This change in terms is another brazen move by Meta.”

It echoes the debate over blocking Google’s crawlers. Publishers have threatened to do so over AI scraping, but have yet to follow through, partly because they still rely on Google for search discovery and traffic, even as referrals decline.

Publishers’ relationships with Google and Meta have some important parallels, but they also differ in significant ways, stressed Eildah Wilson, head of policy and public affairs at the U.K. publisher trade body the PPA. “Both platforms wield enormous power over audience access, making withdrawal a ‘nuclear option’ for publishers,” she said. 

The key difference is how publishers use these platforms, she explained. “Referral traffic from Meta has declined sharply, particularly since 2023, when it deprioritized branded content,” said Wilson. The result: publishers that had invested millions in social media teams and content saw traffic collapse almost overnight.

However, declining traffic has not diminished publishers’ reliance on Meta or its market power, stressed Wilson. “Publishers have adapted, using Meta for audience engagement, conversion and subscription acquisition,” she said. “A publisher may receive relatively little referral traffic from Meta but still depend on it for a significant proportion of new subscriptions. Referral traffic alone therefore understates Meta’s power over publishers. This is why we need an SMS [Strategic Market Status] investigation into Meta, as we’ve seen with Google Search.”

Another head of audience at a news publisher said social platforms remain critical to reaching new audiences, building awareness around its journalism and connecting with readers on platforms where they spend their time.

“I don’t see us abandoning our social accounts,” they said. “I think publishers can recognize the downsides of these relationships while still seeing tremendous value in being on these platforms. It’s not an either-or proposition.”

A third head of audience wasn’t yet certain how their outlet would evaluate its relationship with Meta going forward, as it was a decision that would be made at a more senior executive level. But they had strong words about the upcoming terms change.

“This is another example of Meta using brute force to get what it wants from the publishing industry. Publishers are being asked to accept sweeping access to their sites as the price of reaching audiences on Meta’s platforms. It’s a shameless pursuit of Meta’s own benefit, with little regard for the sustainability of the journalism its products depend on,” they said.

Meta has also recently started charging brands for link posts, which can help drive audiences to their sites. While publishers are excluded from this, the first head of audience wondered for how long.

All of this points to why a number of publishing trade bodies are turning to regulators and lawmakers to pressure Meta into changing its terms, leading to developments like the CMA investigation, the Norwegian court injunction and U.S. Senators urging Meta to abandon the proposed terms.

Wilson said Meta needs to “unbundle” its terms and separate access to its platform from permission to crawl publishers’ content. Publishers should be able to allow link previews or advertising while blocking uses such as AI training and product development, explained Wilson. Those choices need to be enforceable: protections such as robots.txt should be written into binding terms, not left to public assurances, she added. 

Publishers should also be told which crawlers and third parties collect their content, what they collect and how that material is used. Meta’s terms, Wilson argues, should not retroactively authorize past copying or make publishers responsible for content they do not have the rights to license. 

“This goes beyond communication and transparency. The terms themselves must change,” said Wilson. “As drafted, they leave publishers with an impossible choice: withdraw from services their businesses depend on, or accept crawling and use of their content without firm legal safeguards. Regardless of Meta’s intentions, that legal exposure is unacceptable.”