Meta accused of assault on journalism with new AI scraping terms
Meta announced new commercial terms that would let it crawl any website linked to a Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp business account, with the rules taking effect on Oct 30. Publishers say the change would let Meta harvest large amounts of news content for its AI models without paying, and that businesses refusing the terms must stop using Meta’s platforms for commercial purposes.
Key points
- Meta's new terms let it scrape any site linked to a Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp business account, effective Oct 30.
- The News Media Association says the move could cut up to a third of local publishers' referral traffic from Facebook.
- The CMA is meeting with Meta and may use its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act powers to block the terms.
The News Media Association, representing titles such as The Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian, warned the move could cut up to a third of local publishers’ referral traffic from Facebook and urged the UK Competition and Markets Authority to block the terms under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The CMA has met with Meta and said it is reviewing the concerns, while Meta maintains the changes only affect its ads and business products and that content owners can still use robots.txt to control crawling.
The story so far
3 episodes →- Meta accused of assault on journalism with new AI scraping termsthis story
Meta accused of ‘outrageous assault on journalism’ with new AI rules
telegraph.co.uk · 21 October 2026
Loading the full article…
This text was published by telegraph.co.uk and written by James Warrington. It is reproduced here with attribution so you can read it in full; the rights remain with the publisher. Read it at the source ↗
The headline, key points and digest above were generated by Digest AI's editorial model from the linked sources. Automated summaries can contain errors: the sources are the record. Spotted a mistake? Tell us. Published by Martin K., who runs Digest AI and handles corrections.
More in Policy & Regulation
All →- OpenAI's internal monitoring system found vulnerabilities in third‑party pilot · 1 src
- Bill Gates says prepare for roughly two decades of tumultuous AI disruption · 1 src
- Reservoir sues Suno and Anthropic over alleged copyrighted music use in AI models · 1 src
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pledges $2 billion for Europe’s sovereign AI push · 7 src
- Anthropic and OpenAI have funneled $100 million into super PACs for 2024 midterms · 3 src
Comments
via GitHub Discussions