News Media Canada, a trade body representing the country’s largest publishers, is demanding that Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) abandon updated commercial terms of service that could allow AI training on news content.
The group argues the revised language would permit Meta to deploy web crawlers to scrape content from sites linked to business account users without adequate restrictions or transparency.
The original terms stated that users authorized Meta to use tools including web crawlers to scrape associated content to “develop, improve, research, train … Meta company products, service and features provided under these commercial terms.”
Meta temporarily introduced the updated terms before pulling them back following significant backlash from media organizations and digital rights groups in the United States and Europe.
The company has since removed the contentious language and pushed back the proposed implementation date, initially to October 30 and then further to November 20.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and has committed to spending US$825 billion, with a substantial portion directed toward AI computing infrastructure and capacity.
The company has been aggressively investing in artificial intelligence in an effort to close the gap with frontier labs such as OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC.
News Media Canada represents major Canadian publishers including The Globe and Mail Inc., Torstar Corp., and Postmedia Network Canada Corp., giving the advocacy group significant weight in this dispute.
Paul Deegan, president and chief executive officer of News Media Canada, said the revisions Meta has made so far fall short of addressing the core concerns raised by publishers.
“We are still very much concerned,” Deegan said, warning that the group is prepared to call on Ottawa to intervene if Meta maintains the new terms in any form.
Deegan pointed out that the revised terms fail to guarantee Meta will adhere to stated restrictions or limit the scope of content collected by its crawlers.
“The revised terms don’t actually spell out that Meta will abide by the restrictions, nor do they promise that Meta will limit scraping to identified bots,” he said.
He added that the terms “do not limit how content collected by that crawler may be used,” leaving publishers exposed to broad and potentially unchecked data extraction.
The dispute reflects a broader tension between large technology platforms and news organizations over the use of publisher content to fuel commercial AI development.
