FROM THE PUBLISHER | Feeding the Facebook AI | Opinion – Manhattan Mercury

You probably don’t know much about Facebook’s terms of service. I don’t think much about it, either – but a looming change to them is setting off alarm bells for news publishers like us. By extension, I think it forces awkward questions on you, too. The new terms – which you have to accept if you want to use Facebook, Instagram or any other service owned by Meta – say that Meta gets to scrape everything from the website of any business that uses it, for any purpose Meta wants. Think about that for a minute. That means Meta could slurp up all the content that we’ve ever published on TheMercury.com – news stories, feature stories, photos, videos, searchable databases, ads, legal notices, obits, special sections, public employee payroll lists, brilliant opinion columns like this one. Same goes for 1350KMAN.com. Video clips, podcasts, arrests. All of it. To be used for whatever purpose Meta wants. Which means Meta could train its AI to compete directly with our news services. It means Meta could use our content, our contacts and our relationships to sell even more ads to the Manhattan businesses that otherwise would buy ads from us, helping support local
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