Andrew Deck

NEW: Virtually every news organization has a Meta business account. Meta’s new terms say it can scrape websites “associated with” those accounts — and use the content to “train” its products. @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I on what this means for publishers: www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

🚨NEW: Senator Adam Schiff (@schiff.senate.gov) tells Meta to withdraw its commercial terms that allow for the mass-scraping of business users' websites. Following Senator Marsha Blackburn's comments on Friday, Meta's terms have now become a bipartisan concern. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/a-gr...

Meta has delayed the roll out of terms that would allow broad scraping of news sites. New date: November 20. Legal experts and news publisher associations remain skeptical. @hanaatameez.bsky.social with the latest update in our ongoing coverage @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

🚨 NEW: Meta has delayed rolling out terms that would allow broad scraping of news sites. New date: November 20. Legal experts are still skeptical. The push comes one week after @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I first reported how the terms would impact news publishers. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

NEW: "You can’t unscrape that content." With Meta’s new commercial terms set to take effect on October 30, more and more publishers and media advocates on both sides of the Atlantic are pressing Meta and regulators to stop them. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/publ...

Last week, @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I reported that Meta’s new TOS allows scraping of publisher sites. On Tuesday, our reporting was cited in the U.K. Parliament and by German publishers. Both urged regulators to stop the terms from taking effect on Oct 30. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/u-k-...

On Tuesday, two major German publisher associations called on the European Commission to prohibit Meta’s new terms of service from going into effect next week. They alleged the terms for Meta business accounts could violate the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act. buff.ly/WGlpsYa

NEW: The Wall Street Journal is using a custom AI tool called "Doppler" to monitor podcasts and social media ahead of the midterms. It uses a database of 25 million TikTok videos and 500,000 podcasts to gauge public opinion trends that traditional polling can miss. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-...

Last year @andrewdeck.bsky.social reported Handshake was recruiting journalism grads to label data for Scale AI. @randomwalker.bsky.social said in Oct this is the "horrific" future big tech has mapped out for journalists Then julesaroscoe.bsky.social reported HS offered $$$ for her reporting notes

On Friday, Meta changed its terms of services after @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I reported they would allow Meta to scrape any website "associated with" a business account. Despite the update, legal experts tell us the revised terms still permit mass scraping. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/lega...

NEW: After our reporting, Meta removed “train” from its upcoming commercial terms. But the terms still allow broad website scraping and could potentially supersede robots.txt. @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I followed up with the experts: www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/lega...

Does this news change how you’re thinking about your publication’s presence on Meta platforms? We want to hear from you. Get in touch: andrew@niemanlab.org + hanaa@niemanlab.org 📩

Nieman Lab has a story about Meta's new commercial terms. I'm quoted near the end.

NEW: Virtually every news organization has a Meta business account. Meta’s new terms say it can scrape websites “associated with” those accounts—and use the content to “train” its products. @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I on what this means for publishers: www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

USA Today Co. executives are doubling down on the company's Palantir deal, claiming the newspaper chain is becoming “an intelligence organization.” www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/were...

In July, The New York Times launched an internal chatbot called News Agent: “[It's] an uber agent that basically acts as a drop-in replacement for chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT." More in my write-up of the AI x Investigative Journalism Forum for @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/uber...

ChatGPT is adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists to its AI-generated images. So far, I've found the signatures of more than 15 contributors. "It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me." www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding its landmark copyright victory over the AI startup Ross Intelligence. It's the first time a U.S. circuit judge has ruled on fair-use arguments in an AI copyright case. www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/fede...

OpenAI has committed $10 million to fund the next cohort of the @lenfestinstitute.org's AI fellowship. So far, the program has embedded AI engineers in big metro newspapers across the U.S. Now, Lenfest is eyeing local TV news and newsrooms covering statehouses. www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/open...

Arbiter uses LLMs and agents to pull posts from social media and analyze them at scale. It's part of a new crop of AI tools trying to fill the void left by CrowdTangle for reporting on disinformation. I spoke to the founders about building for journalists first. www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/two-...

I dug into the DOJ’s letter yesterday backing OpenAI in its ongoing copyright litigation with The New York Times. One of the strangest arguments: a ruling in favor of the Times would actually hurt small and independent news publishers. www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/trum...

The Department of Justice filing argues that large publishers will disproportionately benefit if AI companies have to pay to use copyrighted content. www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/trum...

I took a look at Backstory, an experimental tool from Google DeepMind that automates parts of the image verification process. “Backstory takes an initial process that would take you 50 minutes, and it can shrink it down to three," @mikecaulfield.bsky.social told me. www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/goog...

Japanese news outlets have launched a new web standard to fight AI-generated imposter sites. Originator Profile (OP) cryptographically signs news articles to authenticate them. Yomiuri Shimbun+Asahi Shimbun have already integrated OP into their CMS. @niemanlab.org www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/japa...

Nice write up of some of the AI-oriented changes to the SPJ code of ethics by @andrewdeck.bsky.social www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/the-...

This year, five Pulitzer winners and three finalists disclosed AI use to the judges. That's the most since the disclosure requirement was added in 2024. I asked several of the reporters behind these stories how they brought LLMs and other AI tools into their work. www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/a-re...

NEW: At least five media companies are using algorithmic pricing to decide how much news subscribers should pay. If you've been told that your news subscription price was determined by an algorithm using your personal data, please take the survey at the end: www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/this...

Business Insider was once synonymous with news aggregation. But in the AI search era, it's turned its back on aggregation altogether. I sat down with editor-in-chief Jamie Heller to learn how she's trying to reshape the publication to break its own news. www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/busi...

“Every piece of DNA extracted puts a title on a book of life, and every one of these books is the largest book by a very big magnitude than the longest book ever written by a human. I’m depressed to think about burning the books of life without ever reading them.” www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/ther...

Fact-checkers around the world face major funding cuts from USAID and Meta. Meanwhile, new threats loom, including attempts to influence AI products through what some have dubbed "LLM poisoning." My report from the GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/at-g...

A new partnership between Beehiiv and Cloudflare gives independent journalists a suite of tools to control which AI crawlers are scraping their work. www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/beeh...

After McClatchy forced reporters at the Centre Daily Times to add their bylines to AI-generated articles, the Pennsylvania newspaper decided to unionize. The NewsGuild-CWA says its their first union drive in the country due to concerns about newsroom AI adoption. www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/the-...

NEW: More than 340 local U.S. news outlets are limiting @archive.org's access to their journalism. @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I have mapped out what at looks like across the country: www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more...

personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

Yesterday, Semafor published an AI-assisted conference report based on an analysis of hundreds of session transcripts. "[Our audience] expects really high-quality analysis and whatever tool we’re using to get there is secondary," @semaforben.bsky.social told me. www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/sema...

NEW: A PR company is operating a bizarre fake news site that's plagiarizing original journalism at a massive scale -- all while spewing misinformation, publishing hallucinated quotes, and replacing real people’s names with “Jane Doe.” Also: it misquotes the Pope. futurism.com/artificial-i...

I'm quoted in this for signing & sharing a testimonial about an incident in which Vancouver Police edited their press release after I'd published an article about it to make it look like I had lied. Anyway, long live the Wayback Machine! www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/jour...

Earlier this year, Lab broke the story that The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. had begun limiting the Wayback Machine’s access to their news articles. Now, journalists are pushing for news publishers to lift the restrictions. www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/jour...

Thanks @knibbs.bsky.social for the shout! Earlier this year, @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I broke the story that major news publishers were blocking the Wayback Machine. Wired with a follow-up this week on the journalists and digital rights orgs pushing back against the decision.

So glad this story is gaining traction & wanted to highlight that @andrewdeck.bsky.social at @niemanlab.org broke the news that NYT/Guardian/USA Today were blocking IA earlier this year. Encourage all to read: www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news...

Yesterday, the ProPublica Guild walked off the job in the first strike by a major U.S. newsroom over, at least in part, AI protections. I spoke with striking journalists and union leaders on the picket line in New York for @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/prop...

"We are lucky that we are still alive, and we are lucky that we are able to speak with you, while we hope that one day you will all be able to come to Gaza and witness everything with your own eyes, and write about that with your own words and pens." niemanreports.org/lyons-award-...