AI agents have no rules, so Meta wrote its own

Why would anyone trust Meta? After all, this is the company that became the world’s avatar for shameless and exploitative data harvesting. The same data mastery that powers one of the most effective advertising platforms ever made also gave us Cambridge Analytica, whistleblowers like Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn-Williams, and unflattering films like The Social Dilemma and, just this month, The Social Reckoning. In the Axios-Harris Poll 100, Meta scored a lowly 59.6, down in the basement with ByteDance and X. Publishers have their own reasons to be suspicious. Meta once vastly increased the reach of its properties, and even paid them for content, then abruptly took it all away when its priorities shifted. Meta has blocked news entirely in Canada since 2023, and briefly did the same in Australia in 2021. So when Nieman Lab reported that Meta had changed its terms of service in a way that seemed to give itself permission to scrape the site of any company with a Meta Business account, nobody was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. The new terms, which allow Meta to use automated tools to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” websites “associated with”…

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