Nigeria Orders Probe Into Meta, Google and X Over AI Scraping of News Content

Nigeria has opened a new front in the global battle between publishers and artificial-intelligence companies. President Bola Tinubu has ordered a probe into allegations that Meta, Google, X and other AI platforms scraped copyrighted news content from Nigerian publishers to train their models — without permission and without paying.

The investigation will examine three interlocking claims: that the platforms harvested copyrighted journalism to feed their AI systems, that they abused their market dominance, and that they denied publishers fair compensation for content that powers both search products and the new generation of AI chatbots.

The move places Africa's most populous nation among the governments worldwide confronting the AI industry's foundational practice of training models on scraped web content. Publishers in the United States and Europe have pursued lawsuits and licensing deals over the same issue, but assertive regulatory action from an African government marks a significant expansion of the battlefield — and could set a precedent for other countries on the continent.

The economics at stake are existential for Nigerian media. The country's press — among the continent's most vibrant — has watched advertising revenue migrate to the platforms for years; AI systems that summarise or reproduce journalism without driving traffic or revenue back to its creators threaten to sever the industry's remaining lifelines.

For the platforms, Nigeria is a market too large to ignore: over 200 million people and the continent's biggest digital economy. How the probe unfolds — and whether it produces compensation frameworks, fines or licensing requirements — will be watched closely across Africa, where the question of who profits from local content in the AI era is only beginning to be asked.