Nieman Lab

Legal experts say Meta's revised terms of service, despite reworded language, continue to give the company broad permission to scrape user content, reportedly for training its artificial intelligence models. The analysis, reported by Nieman Lab, suggests the changes are cosmetic rather than substantive, renewing concerns among journalists, publishers and privacy advocates about how user material and news content can be used without explicit consent.

Nieman Lab reports that 2026 is shaping up to be what it calls 'a super El Niño year for local news', suggesting the industry's financial and staffing crisis is set to intensify further. The outlook comes amid ongoing declines in advertising revenue, closures of local outlets, and continued layoffs across the US news sector, prompting renewed concern about coverage of communities.