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Opinion: Government, industry must push back against Meta's scraping over-reach

If Meta seeks to enforce its new commercial terms of service, competition authorities around the world, including Canada’s Competition Bureau, need to intervene

The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the News/Media Alliance (which represents news and magazine publishers in the U.S.) and News Media Canada are calling on Meta to suspend a provision in the company’s new commercial terms that would allow Meta to crawl and collect content from news publishers’ websites as a condition of using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger for business.

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The new terms, which will now take effect on Nov. 20, appear to require every business that uses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger through a business account to grant Meta extraordinary and disproportionate privileges to exploit the content of its websites for free. They authorize Meta to use automated tools and test credentials to access websites associated with any business that uses its services, and to keep collecting updates from them. Because almost every news organization maintains a Facebook page (the public account businesses and publishers use), a........

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