Senator says planned Meta commercial terms update could harm US businesses

On October 23, US Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, voiced concerns over Meta Platforms' planned update to its commercial terms. Blackburn argued that the changes could potentially harm US businesses and creators by granting Meta extensive authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts.

Earlier in the day, Meta announced it would postpone the implementation of the updated commercial terms from October 30 to November 20 to address concerns from publishers and digital advertisers. The EU and UK antitrust authorities have received complaints about these new terms, which publishers and advertisers claim would give Meta unlimited rights to use their content for AI services. Meta has denied these allegations.

Blackburn criticized Meta for revising its terms to remove an explicit reference to AI training but claimed the new language still allows for extensive scraping of external websites and enables Meta to "develop" its business products with collected content. She emphasized the lack of clear restrictions on how that information can be used, including whether it could be integrated into AI systems. Without such limitations, Blackburn argued that Meta's revisions do little to protect creators' intellectual property.

Blackburn highlighted the concerns of American news publishers, creators, and small businesses that rely on Meta's platforms to reach their audiences and customers. Without clear protections, these entities could see their valuable content exploited by Meta without proper compensation or control. Meta, for its part, noted it had delayed the change and stated the revised terms only apply to its ads and business products, not its web crawlers.

The company reiterated it does not intend to override content owners' preferences and that publishers can continue to use robots.txt to signal their wishes.

The controversy underscores the ongoing conflict between copyright owners and AI companies using their content without permission to train large language models.