Meta has told the United States Trade Representative that it now detects unauthorised live sports streams with an artificial intelligence tool and removes them before they reach an audience, in a filing reported on Monday by Ernesto Van der Sar of TorrentFreak.
The filing is part of an annual cycle. Rightsholder groups including the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America sent the USTR their overviews of notorious piracy markets earlier in October, listing dozens of sites and naming some online platforms and infrastructure providers; the platforms then file rebuttals, and the agency reviews both before publishing a final list, expected early next year.
Meta's rebuttal, docketed as USTR-2026-0529-0045, is mainly concerned with counterfeiting. Unlike last year's, it also contains a piracy section, and that section is largely about live streams.
The tool is described in the company's own words. "In 2026, we built and launched an advanced AI enforcement tool that analyzes video content" and other signals to "predict whether the content is an unauthorized stream of a professional sports broadcast". Meta says that once flagged, "we can proactively remove this content in real time, before it gains a significant audience", and "without a rights holder ever having to intervene".
Other measures are structural rather than analytical. New Facebook Live accounts cannot use Live at all, most users are capped at a few simultaneous streams, and accounts whose live stream has been blocked lose some features. Content judged likely to be infringing is given reduced distribution and delays, so that enforcement can act before the public sees it.
The company also describes work further upstream. It says the majority of its removals of content promoting illegal streaming devices and services are now proactive, and it shows warning pop-ups to users searching for terms such as firestick loaded and iptv free. TorrentFreak notes it spotted similar warnings on the company's platforms in 2023.
Other filers took other approaches. Mega, named by the RIAA as a cyberlocker, responded on 20 October describing itself as a cloud storage platform, with a repeat-infringer policy that suspends accounts after three strikes within six months. Its filing acknowledges that, because of a technical error, that suspension system did not operate fully in the fourth quarter of 2024 or at all in the first quarter of 2025, and was fixed in early April 2025; the outage appears in two footnotes of its transparency report.
Cloudflare, which has filed rebuttals since 2016, repeated its central argument verbatim from last year: that using the notorious markets process to pressure infrastructure companies is "misguided and a misuse of this vital trade tool".
TorrentFreak observes that a great many of this year's submissions and rebuttals repeat or copy earlier text, which suggests how little has been resolved between one review and the next.
It is worth taking Meta's description entirely at its word, because each element of it is offered as a measure of success. The content is identified by prediction. It is removed before it gains a significant audience. It is removed without the rightsholder ever having to intervene. Put together, these describe an event with no witnesses.
Nobody watched it, by design. Nobody was told, by design. The stream itself no longer exists, by design. What survives the process is the prediction that made it, and the filing publishes no figures at all: no removal counts, no sports events covered, no response times beyond real time.
This matters more than it might in another forum, because the notorious markets review runs on reported scale. It is built from lists, counts and named sites supplied by people who noticed something. A platform that intercepts infringement before it can be noticed has not so much reduced piracy as retired the paperwork, and the review has no instrument for reading a blank page.
Our analysts observe that the logic is now closed in a way trade policy rarely achieves. Evidence of a problem is evidence that enforcement is failing; absence of evidence is evidence that it is working. There is no third result available, and the company holds the only copy of the data either way.
On its own account Meta has made its piracy unmeasurable, which in a review assembled from submissions is the next best thing to not having any.