Senator says planned Meta commercial terms update could harm US businesses

US Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, expressed worries on October 23 about Meta Platforms' strategy to revise its commercial terms, claiming the modifications could endanger businesses and creators. As the leader of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, Blackburn highlighted that the updated terms suggest Meta aims to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself broad permissions to extract content from any site linked with Facebook and Instagram business accounts.

Meta recently announced a one-week delay in implementing the updated commercial terms, from October 30 to November 20, in response to publisher and digital advertiser concerns. The EU and UK antitrust authorities have also received complaints about the new terms, which publishers and digital advertisers argue would grant Meta unrestricted access to their content for AI applications.

Meta refutes these accusations. Blackburn criticized Meta for not going far enough in their revisions, noting that the changes only authorize extensive content scraping and permit Meta to "develop" its business products using the collected material. She emphasized that without stringent limitations on how this data can be employed, including whether it may be used in AI systems, Meta's revisions offer little assurance that creators' intellectual property will be safeguarded.

Blackburn added that this is particularly troublesome for American news publishers, creators, and small businesses that depend on Meta's platforms to reach their audiences and customers. When asked for a response to Blackburn's letter, Meta stated that they had postponed the change and clarified that the revised terms only apply to their ads and business products, and they are not altering their use of web crawlers.

Meta also emphasized that the updates do not grant them new rights to override such preferences and that content owners can still use robots.txt to express their preferences. Publishers around the globe are intensifying their disputes with AI companies utilizing their content without authorization to train large language models, highlighting the conflict between copyright holders and those invoking fair-use arguments.

Blackburn concluded by urging Meta to retract the revised Commercial Terms and engage to protect the content of creators and publishers across the nation, asserting that American creators and small businesses are not a free source of content for Meta to exploit.