The Entire Newsroom in Exchange for a Facebook Page? Press Revolt Against Meta's New Terms

Meta has postponed until November 20 the introduction of its new commercial terms, after international press organizations, publishers and advertising trade associations jointly protested against a provision that they say would allow the tech giant to automatically harvest the content of websites. At first glance, the dispute concerns fine print in a contract, but in reality it is about whether a publisher that uses Facebook's or Instagram's business tools thereby also opens its own website to Meta, and whether the company can use, without a separate agreement or payment, all the journalistic work it finds there.

According to the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and German publishers' organizations, the effect of the terms goes far beyond the articles that newsrooms share on social media. In their interpretation, Meta could use automated programs to penetrate the websites linked to its business users, collect and analyze their content, and even regularly retrieve newly published material — that is, articles, images and videos that an outlet publishes exclusively on its own website and never posts to Facebook or Instagram. WAN-IFRA finds it particularly worrying that the terms would also authorize the creation of test access accounts, and is therefore demanding a written guarantee that Meta will respect paywalls and all other access restrictions. The organization also points out that although the company removed, in response to the protests, a reference to training artificial intelligence from the text, the vague wording that still allows for product development offers, in the publishers' view, no real safeguard.

Meta denies that the new rules would give it unlimited rights to use press content for artificial intelligence purposes. According to the company, the provisions apply only to its advertising and business products, do not change its web data-collection practices, and content owners can still specify in their robots.txt file what search crawlers may access. It justified the postponement by saying it needs more time to explain the changes. The publishers, however, object precisely to the fact that these reassuring statements appear nowhere in the contractual terms — and while a press release does not bind the company, a contract does. They are therefore demanding a binding commitment that Meta will honor robots.txt instructions and all other machine-readable rights reservations, and that the use of journalistic material in artificial intelligence systems be made subject to a separate license. WAN-IFRA is also demanding that newsrooms be able to reject the data-collection provision without losing access to Meta's business tools — in other words, that they should not have to pay for their Facebook presence with the content of their entire website.

EANA's statement of October 23 goes even further, demanding the complete removal of the contested provision and its replacement with rules that respect copyright. According to Alexandru Giboi, the organization's secretary general, the new terms would essentially hand over, on a platter, the content of every news outlet that uses Meta's platforms. This poses the greatest threat to smaller newsrooms already in a difficult financial situation, since they rely for their survival precisely on the work that the tech company wants to access for free. Giboi also warned that pushing credible press out of social platforms harms the public sphere as a whole, because if reliable newsrooms are forced to abandon the platforms where a large part of their audience gets information, their place will not remain empty — it will be filled by distributors of unverified and manipulative content. EANA is therefore urging voluntary, separately negotiated and paid licensing agreements, stressing that reaching an audience must not come at the price of a newsroom giving up control over its own content.

The German publishers' associations, BDZV and MVFP, are calling for the European Commission to intervene. In their view, the terms may violate the fair-access requirements set out in the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) and could also amount to an abuse of dominant position; they are therefore asking that the application of the provisions be banned for the duration of the investigation, since once publishers' content has been collected, it is almost impossible afterward to regain control over it. The dispute has already reached competition authorities, as the Movement for an Open Web, which represents publishers and advertisers, has filed complaints with both the European Commission and the UK competition authority. The press organizations' message is clear: they are ready to negotiate how Meta may use their content, but in exchange they expect consent, rules and payment — because running a Facebook page does not mean a newsroom wants to become Meta's unpaid content-production department.

Ugar