Meta: Move fast and break into things

Meta slips a WTF into all its T&Cs as it tries to steal the internet without you noticing.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 14:51, 22 October 2026

Can we just take a moment to pause and reflect on what a particularly stagnant, stinking pool of blandly malign awfulness Meta has become? In the now decade-long deluge of general Big Tech unpleasantness, we can now truly appreciate its place as the film on top of the filth of modern predatory businesses.

Meta has decreed, under new Terms & Conditions it will enforce from October 30th, that it has rights to access and use whatever content is held by owners of business accounts on any of its platforms. This, according to the wording of the merchet-like clause in question, would include content not actually posted on any Meta platforms, but anywhere on your sites. 

It is a digital territory grab of breathtaking shamelessness and raises the prospect of content that would cost a great deal of money to acquire by anything resembling ordinary transactional business methods being Meta's to take for free. And, anything else on your site it can find too, given that the T&Cs allow it to make test accounts and explore whatever it can.

The underhand T&C move was first revealed by Nieman Lab, and all credit to them, and especially to Stephen Beale, the founder and editor of The Steampunk Explorer, who contacted Nieman after he saw a notice of the upcoming change in his Meta Business Suite dashboard.

It's worth reading the passage in question to comprehend the full horror of what is being done:

"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."

Yes, you read that right. It would be funny if it weren't so utterly tragic. The National Law Review has done a good burrowing here, and it is very worth a read to see quite how wide-ranging this can be. 

Publishers made the most noise the quickest, but this isn’t just a media business moment. The new T&Cs apply to anyone using its platforms for business, including Instagram, Facebook pages, and WhatsApp Business numbers, meaning influencers, banks, photographers, sports clubs, artists, the Government, your local kebab shop, and many more, are all in theory on the hook. Won't somebody think of the influencers! 

Most have no idea they’re about to tacitly agree to anything, because, err... who reads the T&Cs anyway?

Taking it wider, any website “associated with” an account is fair game to Meta’s crawlers it says, which again can span everything from portfolios and blogs, to shops and LinkedIn pages, to gated investor documents, to pretty much anything Meta's burglebots can find - even going so far as to create test credentials and accounts to do so, which you will be agreeing to. 

One legal analysis suggests the sites of links you share would also be covered - including any you put in news stories. Good luck arguing that one after you shared a story about Disney.

Again, big credit to Nieman Lab, as their initial report almost immediately saw a grudging climbdown from Meta, with the word "train" removed from the text, albeit only in the US text to date. Yet this small concession makes little difference to the meaning of the broader clause, according to a number of legal experts, with Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, telling Nieman: "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.'"

Indeed. In the UK, the terms change attracted the immediate attention of the Competition and Markets Authority, with meetings with Meta representatives scheduled for this week. Check your pockets after they leave, Team CMA! The fact is though, Meta's UK representatives are charitably to be thought of as monkeys, not organ grinders, as the old phrase goes. Maybe concern at a UK government level carries some weight at Meta's US HQ, maybe it doesn't.

What to do?

In response to this attempted annexation by Meta of all we own and produce, I've seen quoted data from the likes of Piano that for publishers Facebook accounts for "under 6 per cent of visitors and below 4 per cent of subscription conversions". The numbers are even lower for Instagram. 

So really, what is the point? Is it simply time to deactivate those business accounts and move on? Almost every day that passes gives publishers new reason to consider severing participation in any of Meta's or Google's projects. The game simply isn't worth the candle, to use another old maxim. The sad part is that while I think many publishers actually could leave, the majority of affected businesses, mostly small and independent, won't be able to.

We don't need to list Meta's full rap sheet here but we all know it's unpleasant reading for any company, let alone one we all seem to assume is part of the global digital fabric, and whose people don't yet feel the need to obscure who they work for.

The "building the future" fig leaf Meta has hidden behind to excuse its worst excesses is now practically transparent. Scandal after scandal has eroded what trust they had. Indeed, as this piece was being penned, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for "misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from flourishing on its services" - a judgement related to the Cambridge Analytica revelations. 

Remember to hat-tip The Guardian's Harry Davies and Observer's Carole Cadwalladr for bringing the story to light, others who followed it up, and Channel 4 for getting it on film in a good old-fashioned undercover reporting job, and ask perhaps who is today's Christopher Wylie pondering their future at Meta et al?

I don't know about you, and I've made some questionable decisions, but I've never attempted to sabotage democracy itself. (There's still time, Rob! - Ed). But it's just another day for Meta, as was the $18bn settlement in the recent child online safety case for its proactive building of features and services which could easily be regarded as depraved in how they dealt with children.

It has to be noted that there is still a chance Meta will be broken up. The US Federal Trade Commission is currently appealing 2025's ruling that Meta did not hold a monopolistic position in the social networking market. One can hope.

Looking at Mark Zuckerberg's wiki profile, there's a telling sentence in the account of his university days, the period in which he built Facemash, an Ick-as-a-Platform project which rated the attractiveness of other Harvard students through a public voting system: "Many students complained that their photos were being used without permission."

He knows no other way. It's in the DNA of the business model.