Brazilian court bars Meta from scraping news sites for AI

A São Paulo state court on 3 November suspended a clause in Meta’s revised Commercial Terms that would let it crawl the websites of its business users, and ordered it to stay off the sites of members of three Brazilian media associations. PPC Land reported that Judge Guilherme Madeira Dezem granted the interim order without hearing Meta, on an application from the broadcasters’ association ABERT, the newspaper association ANJ and the magazine publishers’ association ANER. The court file itself was not available for this entry; the account rests on PPC Land, which quotes an unofficial English translation of the order, and on Reporters Without Borders.

According to PPC Land, the order suspends the final part of Clause 1 of the terms, which Meta had announced would take effect on 20 November, until final judgment. It requires Meta to keep the members’ Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads accounts running normally if they refuse the terms. It also bars Meta, directly or through third parties, from using crawlers or bots on the members’ domains, or from using their content to “train, fine-tune or feed” Meta AI. The penalty is R$1 million for each day of non-compliance, capped at R$100 million. Meta has five days to contest the order; PPC Land noted that Meta had not yet put its case to the court and that the order is temporary.

RSF said the court stressed the need for publishers’ explicit consent before their content is used to train AI models. It also reported that Oslo District Court on 28 October temporarily blocked the same terms in a suit by ten Norwegian media companies and groups, and that the terms would otherwise have forced outlets to let Meta collect their content, including paywalled material, or leave its platforms. RSF said Meta removed the word “train” from the terms after pressure and postponed implementation to 20 November, while the revised wording still allows broad collection for advertising, commercial products and security. On 28 October Meta also announced consultations with industry representatives and postponed the terms, according to RSF, which noted this sits uneasily with the 20 November date. RSF’s technology and journalism head, Vincent Berthier, argued that media outlets cannot depend on a succession of temporary legal remedies and that regulators should act before platforms impose their terms.

Both court orders are interim measures, pending a final ruling in each case. The same terms are also the subject of a UK Competition and Markets Authority investigation opened on 30 October, and RSF said the European Commission had confirmed it received a complaint. The sources reviewed contain no statement from Meta on the Brazilian order.