If you have received any emails about terms of service from a US tech firm in 2026, you may already know that the word “update” no longer means what reasonable people believe it to mean.
“Updated,” in United States corporate parlance, means enshittified.
Updates to terms of service (ToS) in recent years involve a number of anti-user conditions, including having to accept that a company which provides a service you rely on in your life—or are required to use for work—has decided that you will no longer have legal rights to file lawsuits or take part in class action litigation if it does anything harmful to you.
This degradation of users’ rights typically takes the form of changes to terms around binding arbitration (for-profit dispute resolution), which the user bringing the grievance must often pay for. Binding arbitration is worse, and less just, than a court case, and that’s how these companies like it. It’s cheaper for them, in terms of legal risk and associated insurance. Just this calendar year, countless US tech firms “updated” their ToS in relation to binding arbitration clauses, including Venmo, Spotify, and Lyft, to name a few.
Companies quietly deciding that we no longer have legal recourse is the sort of degradation of civil society that we may have learned to accept, but this pales in comparison to what Meta is now trying to do.
On October 15, Nieman Lab drew attention to the fact that Meta’s upcoming “updated” ToS would likely allow the corporate giant to train its AI products on all website content from publishers with Meta business accounts. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, among other platforms and apps. With 3.9 billion global users, this would impact an enormous number of artists, publishers, content creators, designers, photographers, videographers, etc. Nieman Lab consulted three legal experts, who concluded that, “As written, the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products.”
In order to opt out, an organization with a Meta business account would not only have to delete all of its Meta accounts before the “updated” ToS go into effect and remove all Meta products from its website(s), but it is also likely that publishers would have to first go back and delete content individually from Meta-owned platforms. This is a completely unreasonable way to seek consent.
“Meta is pushing this most recent ToS enshittification so that it is on better legal ground as it steals content from