Norwegian Media Outlets Sue Meta Over New Commercial Terms and Content Use

By Staff, Agencies

Major Norwegian media organizations have taken Meta to court over proposed changes to its commercial terms, raising concerns that the company could collect news articles, photographs, and videos for purposes including artificial intelligence development, broadcaster NRK reported on Tuesday.

Members of the Norwegian Media Association [MBL] argue that the revised terms could give Meta broad access to content published by editorially controlled media outlets.

Several major organizations, including NRK, TV 2, Schibsted, Amedia, Polaris, Aller, DN, Mentor Medier, NTB, and Hordaland Folkeblad, have asked the Oslo District Court to suspend the new terms until their legality can be examined.

“We believe that this should be legally assessed to see if this is actually in line with Norwegian law,” said Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, chairwoman of the MBL.

NRK Legal Director Olav Nyhus also expressed strong opposition to allowing Meta to use publishers’ material to strengthen its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

He acknowledged that ending agreements with the two platforms would be difficult because they have become important channels for distributing news and information.

“What Meta is doing is destroying the entire financial basis for journalism,” Nyhus said, adding that the company’s conduct and proposed terms constituted, in the association’s view, a clear violation of competition law.

Meta recently revised its commercial terms, removing wording that had raised concerns about whether material collected from news websites could be used to train artificial intelligence models.

The updated provisions state that automated website crawling is intended to support the development, improvement, research, and maintenance of Meta’s advertising and business products.

However, the terms continue to permit Meta to use automated technologies, including web scrapers, bots, and crawlers, to access and collect content from websites associated with businesses using its platforms.

An earlier version of the proposed terms explicitly referred to using collected material to “train” Meta’s products. That wording triggered concerns among publishers and legal experts about the potential use of copyrighted news content in AI development.

Meta subsequently removed the reference to training and clarified that the website-crawling provisions were intended to cover advertising and business products.

Despite these revisions, Norwegian media organizations are seeking a judicial assessment of the terms, arguing that their implications for publishers’ content, commercial interests, and the financial sustainability of journalism require closer legal scrutiny.