LinkedIn, Reddit, and Meta face lawsuits for scraping user content to train AI models without consent, part of 70+ AI copyright cases filed by end of 2025

The number of copyright infringement cases filed against AI companies more than doubled from approximately 30 at the end of 2024 to over 70 by end of 2025. Social media platforms are both perpetrators and victims: LinkedIn faces a class-action lawsuit for allegedly harvesting private messages to train AI models and sharing data with third parties, then updating its privacy policy in 2024 to retroactively cover the practice. Reddit sued Perplexity AI in October 2025 for industrial-scale scraping using false identities and proxies. ByteDance/TikTok was sued by Ted Entertainment for allegedly circumventing technological measures to scrape millions of copyrighted YouTube videos to train its MagicVideo AI model. Why it matters: billions of social media users unknowingly contributed training data for AI models through their posts, comments, photos, and private messages, so the economic value created by user-generated content is being extracted without compensation or meaningful consent, so creators who built audiences and produced original content on these platforms discover their work has been used to train competitors and AI systems that may replace them, so trust in social media platforms erodes further as users realize their content is a commodity being monetized in ways they never agreed to, so the legal uncertainty around AI training data creates a chilling effect on content creation as creators worry about downstream unauthorized uses. The structural root cause is that social media platforms' terms of service grant broad content licenses that users accept without reading, and the legal framework for AI training data use remains unsettled, creating a regulatory vacuum where platforms and AI companies can extract value from user content faster than courts or legislators can establish protections.