Meta's new commercial terms, set to take effect on October 30th, appear to give the company permission to crawl and scrape websites tied to businesses that use its platforms — including news publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The terms state that Meta can use this outside content to 'develop, improve, research,' and 'train' its AI products, a move that could reshape how AI models access news content.
The policy applies to business accounts that promote content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Legal experts tell Nieman Lab that the language may allow Meta to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions, such as a site's robots.txt file. That could let Meta bypass licensing agreements and freely train its AI on content posted by publishers — a stark contrast to the paid AI licensing deals Meta has struck with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc.
Meta's New Terms: What They Say and When They Start
The new terms go into effect on October 30th and cover domains, web pages, or URLs 'associated' with a business's products or services. According to the policy, businesses authorize Meta 'to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents)' to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl their sites. Meta may then use any content from those domains to 'provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of' its products and services.
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts pushed back on Nieman Lab's reporting, saying there is 'no change to how Meta uses web crawlers' and that 'content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences.' Andy Stone, Meta's VP of communications, added on X that the update is meant to pull accurate product information for ad and content recommendations, not to target news sites. However, legal experts disagree: James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, told Nieman Lab that the terms clearly represent 'permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves.'
