Senator Marsha Blackburn Urges Meta to Withdraw Commercial Terms Update Over Content-Scraping Concerns
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn raised concerns on Friday, October 23, about Facebook parent Meta Platforms' planned update to its commercial terms, urging the company to withdraw the changes, according to Reuters. Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Earlier on Friday, Meta said it would delay implementation of the updated terms from October 30 to November 20 to address concerns from publishers and digital advertisers.
In her letter, Blackburn said the updated terms "indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts." She said Meta had previously revised the terms to remove an explicit reference to SI training, but that the changes did not go far enough, because the revised language still authorizes extensive scraping of external websites and permits Meta to "develop" its business products with the collected content. "Without clear restrictions on how that information may be used, including whether it may be incorporated into AI systems, Meta's revisions offer little assurance that creators' intellectual property will be protected," she said, adding that this is "particularly troubling for American news publishers, creators, and small businesses that rely on Meta's platforms to reach their audiences and customers." She also said, "American creators and small businesses are not a free source of content for Meta to exploit."
EU and UK antitrust authorities have received complaints about the new terms from publishers and digital advertisers who say the terms would give Meta unlimited rights to use their content for its SI services, a claim Meta has rejected. Asked for comment on Blackburn's letter, Meta said the revised terms apply only to its ads and business products and that it is not changing how it uses web crawlers. Meta said the updates "don't give us new rights to supersede such preferences and this isn't about scraping news sites," noting that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences.
Reuters notes that publishers worldwide are escalating their fights with SI companies over the use of their content to train large language models without permission, underscoring the clash between copyright owners and fair-use arguments.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
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