News publishers have until 30 October to decide whether to leave Meta social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram or hand over over AI content access to the tech giant under new terms and conditions.
The social media giant has given notice of updated terms and conditions which give it sweeping rights to scrape content from any publisher that uses Instagram and Facebook and reuse it.
It means that by using Meta platforms, publishers risk handing over AI rights to all their content – whether it is published via Meta or elsewhere.
[Update: UK competition chief ‘very alive’ to risks from sweeping Meta scraping change]
Theo Bamber, chief executive of UK national and regional newspaper trade body the News Media Association, said: “This shameless landgrab attempt from Meta to scrape anything and everything from news publisher and business websites to train their AI products is the worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying.
“We urgently need ministers and regulators to stand up for British creators and the business community by calling out this outrageous behaviour and preventing Meta from setting this dreadful precedent.”
Campaign group Movement for an Open Web is preparing a legal challenge via the European Commission and UK Competition and Markets Authority.
Director James Rosewell said: “The harm is imminent and irreversible once content has been ingested into models. Timing matters.”
Rosewell noted that the European Publishers Council has already said it is writing to European Commission executive vice-presidents Teresa Ribera and Henna Virkkunen, adding: “A joint UK and EU approach with common evidence and signatories will carry more weight than separate ones.”
The group also advised publishers to stop using and delete all Meta corporate and business accounts (Facebook Pages, Instagram business accounts, Ads Manager, Business Manager or Business Suite and WhatsApp Business) before 30 October.
Rosewell believes the new terms will apply for any business which has accounts with Meta, whether these are explicitly described as ‘business’ accounts or not.
The relevant section in the new Meta terms and conditions states that by using its platforms:
“You authorise us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.”
Meta has since removed the word “train” but US media lawyer Matt Topic told Nieman Lab: “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.'”
Meta’s approach contrasts with that of Google which has struck licensing deals with publishers representing more than 400 publications to enable it to scrape and reuse their content for AI purposes. It has been argued that these new Google AI deals are also an abuse of monopoly power.
This was more than 20 times the combined advertising spend with every national and regional newsbrand and magazine (in print and online).
The two companies also dominate the amount of time people in the UK spend online.
Alphabet-owned properties reach 99% of the UK’s online population and Meta reaches 97%.
The average UK web user spent 79 minutes per day with Meta-owned web properties in April 2026, according to Ipsos iris data.
A Meta spokesperson said: “We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
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