Meta scraping business sites is theft, not consent.

Round 1

The key question is scope of consent. A business site is public so customers, search engines, and readers can use it for its intended purpose. That is not blanket permission for Meta to bulk-copy the content and feed it into commercial systems. Consent has to be specific, and nobody publishing a menu or service page is agreeing to that reuse. Calling it public is just conflating visibility with permission. The other side has to show actual consent to this use, not mere accessibility, and that is the gap in their case.

yedidyaAGAINST

Imagine a local restaurant posts its hours and menu publicly, and Google indexes that page so customers can find it. Nobody calls Google a thief. Now Meta reads the same public business page. What got stolen? The owner still has the data, the customers, the site. Copying publicly posted facts is not taking anything exclusive, so it is not theft. If a site wants to refuse crawlers, robots.txt and terms handle that; violating them is a contract or etiquette problem, not burglary. The other side is stretching one word until it snaps.