Senator says planned Meta commercial terms update could harm US businesses

Key Points:

• Senator Blackburn, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, criticized Meta's updated commercial terms, accusing the company of trying to exploit American creators and businesses by broadly scraping content from websites linked to Facebook and Instagram business accounts.
• Meta announced a delay in implementing the updated terms from October 30 to November 20 to address concerns from publishers and digital advertisers, who fear the terms grant Meta unlimited rights to use their content for AI services.
• EU and UK antitrust authorities have received complaints about Meta's new terms, but Meta denies these claims and states the updates apply only to ads and business products, not news sites, and that content owners can still use robots.txt to manage crawling preferences.
• Blackburn argues that despite Meta's removal of explicit AI training references, the revised terms still allow extensive scraping and use of content without clear restrictions, posing risks to intellectual property protections for creators, especially small businesses and news publishers.
• The dispute highlights ongoing tensions between copyright holders and AI companies over the use of content without permission to train large language models, with Blackburn urging Meta to withdraw the updated terms and protect creators' rights.