Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

What would help—as University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel told Nieman Lab—would be if Meta added specific language to the policy where the company agrees to respect scraping instructions in robots.txt files. Since complying with robots.txt is voluntary, Meta could possibly rely on the legally enforceable TOS omitting mentions of robots.txt to scrape sites that attempt to blocking scraping via robots.txt, experts suggested.

When it comes to robots.txt, “you can still express the preference, and unless it’s a legally enforceable preference, it can still be ignored all the same,” Sobel said.

Meta backlash is global

Criticism goes beyond Nieman Lab’s reporting, as news groups globally urge regulators to intervene and block Meta’s controversial terms from kicking in.

A chief executive for the United Kingdom News Media Association, Theo Bamber, accused Meta of a “shameless land grab” relying on the “worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying.” Bamber urged UK regulators to “stand up for British creators and the business community” by “preventing Meta from setting this dreadful precedent.”

Meanwhile, the European Publishers Council has already asked the European Commission to intervene. “Publishers must be able to decide whether and how their journalism is used, and negotiate fair payment,” the group’s executive director, Angela Mills Wad, said. “Burying such far-reaching claims in platform terms is no substitute for consent.”

Similarly, Danielle Coffey, the president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance—which Nieman Lab noted is the largest news publishing trade association in the US—protested the terms as “outrageous and probably illegal.”

In the US, Coffey urged regulators to recognize that Meta’s “decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power.”

“It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30,” Coffey said.