Meta Updates Terms of Service For Business Pages: What Authors Need to Know

On today's episode, it looks like Meta tried to get away with some pretty spooky stuff.This week.We're gonna be going back to the middle of the month and talking about all of this stuff since the time that it kicked off.It's something that, yeah, absolutely could affect author businesses and I had to record this episode a few times because it really ticked me.Welcome back to the Killer Pros Podcast.I'm your host and fellow author Tanner, and today we're talking about Meta's new terms of service.It took me a minute to put my thoughts together on this because does really piss me off and we're going to get into what this means for us as authors.But first I want to talk about the timeline and how things happened with the rollout of these new services.So earlier this month, in October, Meta rolled out changes to the business and creator accounts.Most notably, they started charging for links.So if you're not paying for the new subscription, you get two external links a month and that's it.After that, you've got to pay for it.With some of these accounts charging as much as several hundred dollars a month to be able to post unlimited links pointing away from Facebook.So these are things to like to your books, to podcast episodes, to whatever you're selling or whatever you're trying to promote.This includes like if you want to throw some people over to your editor or over to your cover designer.Not, not a great look.That was what I was focused on.And I didn't notice that deep in the terms of the new rollout was also another update.In mid October, news outlets like Neiman and Ars Technica started reporting on the updates to the actual terms and service agreement for Facebook for the business and creator accounts.The new updates had a line in there that read, you authorize us or any entity acting on our behalf to use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents to create test accounts to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, Web pages or URLs and any content available through them that are associated with your products or services or that are made available through your users use of Meta Company products and services, and to periodically pull updates such as domains, Web pages or URLs.Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta Company products services features provided under these commercial terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.Let that sink in.It's a lot Meta spokespeople have been on record as saying that the terms will not give them the ability to ignore robots Txt on your website.That's the code that tells crawlers from Google and from all of these other companies how they can interact with your website.And that the new terms of service is just a streamlining of the current policy that is spread across multiple sections of their documents and agreements.Now legal experts are calling it an update because the new language that's been added actually expands Meta's access with terms like training, which is associated with generative AI, to the authority to create test credentials to access more of your website.This is more than just the regular scraping that Google and Meta are already doing in the old terms and conditions.The test credentials were really only there for sellers so that Meta could access listings and things like that and make better ads.And it was specifically limited to creating ads for your company as far as what it was using that stuff for.James Grimmelman, I think I'm saying his name right, is a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School.He told Niemann Lab that Meta could train AI on any content from their sites and possibly deploy some of that content in competition with the publishers themselves on Meta platform, meaning that they were in competition with the people that they were already charging money to to post those links on Meta's website.Most of the initial pushback came back from news publishers because it gave Meta the ability to possibly scrape their sites and potentially create things that would be in competition.But the big thing here is it looks like a grab for Meta to be able to continue training their AI models and getting around having to pay for access to that intellectual property.And that's where the pushback came from, from news publishers and from other publishers, and why so many creators are getting pissed.Matt Topic, Media and intellectual property attorney from Lovie and Lovie, told Nieman Lab that this is, and this is a quote, this is a remarkable provision to bury in the terms of service, given that it would give Meta access to material that would likely cost millions of dol in a licensing market.And this was all supposed to roll out on October 30th.It's pretty quick for something like this.Now, several publishers and businesses voiced their concern and along with creators that are using the platform, said that they were ready to leave the platform.As a matter of fact, a lot of people, myself included, started taking steps to move away from Meta so that they didn't have access to our websites, they didn't have access to our content without paying some sort of licensing to train their AI on the things that you know are not made on Meta's platform.And why was everybody leaving?Because in the terms of service, there was no opt out.Meta basically said if you don't like these new terms, you can leave.So people started making plans too.A big concern here and, and how people started fighting back against this.Legal experts said that this was akin to a antitrust practice called tying, where businesses force a buyer to purchase a second product as a condition of buying another.It's illegal.Google actually got into trouble for this not too long ago for, yeah, you guessed it, AI training.So earlier this week, publishers, creators and businesses in an outrage got the attention of governments in the uk, US and eu.And with the mounting pressure, Facebook backed off.Instead of this coming out later this, actually later this week, this weekend on the 30th, it's been pushed back to November 20th to give governments and businesses and Meta time to talk about things and really find out what's going on with this new policy update.They did remove some of the language specifically around training, but honestly, it's still too intrusive.We'll see what happens as this, this continues to unfold, but I'm not waiting around.Personally, I have increased my presence on other platforms like TikTok, which honestly has been better and cheaper.I like TikTok's video editing tools, they're free and that saves me about 35 bucks when compared to what I was using to edit my stuff to put up on the Meta platforms.So, you know, yay there.According to market experts like Thomas Upsted Jr. Met is a dead platform for content for authors anyway.It's great for ads, which is what we're kind of losing out on here.But honestly, with everything that's going on, that might be a non starter for me now.Again, we'll see how it rolls out.But right now my plan moving forward with Meta is to move my content links and everything over to other platforms and possibly just use them for ads.As business owners, we should never become so reliant on a single platform that a change at their business can radically change our business.And that goes for Amazon too.This podcast lives on an RSS feed that I own.It's distributed to hundreds of listener apps all over the world.And if one of them decided to drop my show tomorrow, it wouldn't matter.It wouldn't affect me at all even if that platform was because I own my platform.Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, these are all just tools that I use to connect with people.They can be dropped, switched around and replaced with little to no trouble, little to no effect on me because I own the platform as an author.That RSS feed is replaced by my email list and my relationship with readers.I almost made a horrible mistake that I haven't made since I started my first business, which was a private investigation firm.When I first started that business, I needed to get profitable quickly and I needed to make sure that it was stable.So I started doing subcontract work for larger private investigation firms, specifically in the insurance and corporate markets.And I relied on one specific company for about 80% of my income.And it was great for a couple of years and I was making some inroads into other areas, but I still relied on them because it just became easy.And honestly, as a business owner, I got a little lazy.Well, there was some litigation on some stuff that happened on a case on another state.And then suddenly the industry switched to no longer using subcontractors.So the company could either cannibalize my business and I become their employee or it goes away.And so it went away.Now I was able to pivot and I was already making those inroads into other markets and types of investigation.So I survived it, but I almost didn't.And it was a very, very rough few months.That's not a mistake that I want to make again.So I'm making sure that I stay diversified and decentralized, especially in my author business, which I want to keep going for a long, long time.And as the things update with Meta's terms and use, I'm going to check in on this every so often and just add on little updates as we get closer to the 20th with what I'm doing.But I'm not a big fan of big companies coming in and stealing my shit to train their AI.I'm also not a big fan of big companies coming in and bullying me into letting them have access to systems they have no business accessing to train their AI models to, I don't know, possibly replace me or, you know, I don't know what they've got cooking over there.I don't want to know.I'm just wanting to run my business.So that's what I'm thinking there.In other news, Amazon Unlimited has rebranded to Kindle plus in what honestly is probably the most useless rebrand ever done.The big change here is that they are adding audiobooks.If you're an audiobook narrator.I've got more of you guys listening to the show.Now this is important because it kind of affects us.So they are adding audiobooks to Kindle Unlimited, which is now Kindle Plus.This is only going to be books that are per finished hour or virtual voice.Only Royalty share is excluded unless you buy out the narrator.So if you have a royalty share book on Audible, it will remain there.It's not going to go over to Kindle Plus.As an author inside your KDP dashboard, you'll be able to enroll your narrated and virtual voice audiobooks into Kindle Plus.Now this is kind of weird because it makes Kindle direct competition to Audible and it is going to pull some sales away from the platform.I'm going to do a full episode on that just talking about your audio rights.For those of you who don't know, I'm a writer, but I'm also an audiobook narrator and audio and taking full advantage of everywhere that I can put an audiobook or audio story is a big part of my business plan with growing my author and creator brand inside of indie horror.So those are my thoughts with the whole Kindle Unlimited Kindle plus thing, the entire meta debacle that kicked off this month.If you have questions, reach out.You can find me over@killerpros.com that is the best place to connect with me.It's got links to my author website.You can also sign up for the newsletter so you stay up to date with what's going on there and what's going on with my books, my releases, and just stuff that I'm monitoring in inside of the industry.I believe my next episode is going to be talking specifically about audio rights and then I have an episode coming out talking about building conflict inside of boring scenes when you're doing your revisions.Anyway, thank you so much for listening.Until next time, enjoy the process.