NEWS: Following Inquiry from Sen. Schiff, Meta Pauses Harmful Terms Update That Would Seize Intellectual Property

Washington, D.C. – Following U.S. Senator Schiff (D-Calif)’s recent inquiry to Meta and public backlash about the company’s updated Commercial Terms of Use to require all commercial accounts using Meta platforms to grant expansive authorization to the company to deploy automated crawlers and web scrapers, the company has announced it is reversing course. “I am glad to see that Meta has paused its misguided commercial use terms update, which would have required virtually any news publication, creator, and business to turn over their intellectual property in exchange for access to their platforms,” said Senator Schiff. “Creators and publications deserve to be compensated fairly for their work, and I’ll continue fighting any policy that would undermine that.” In Senator Schiff’s October 24 inquiry to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Schiff argued that the proposed updated terms were “a gross abuse of Meta’s power,” noting that publishers’ and independent creators’ access to a dominant online platform is necessary to reach consumers and should not be conditioned on the uncompensated extraction of their intellectual property. Schiff also raised alarms that the proposed updated terms would harvest the proprietary reporting of local and independent news organizations without compensation to feed Meta’s commercial AI models. Read Schiff’s full original inquiry here . ###