Policy Overview

Meta’s new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites “associated” with the businesses that use its platforms — including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, state that Meta can use this external content to “develop, improve, research,” and “train” its AI products.

Meta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free

The new policy specifically grants Meta the ability to crawl all websites 'associated' with a business account.

Legal Interpretations

While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts claims the company is merely “consolidating” its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts informed Nieman Lab that this could enable Meta to argue its commercial terms override other blocking instructions, such as a site’s robots.txt file. This interpretation suggests Meta could potentially bypass existing licensing agreements and freely train its AI models on content from online publishers.

The updated policy applies to business accounts that promote their content across Meta's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The relevant section states:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.

Meta's Stance and Industry Context

Roberts disputes Nieman Lab’s interpretation, asserting, “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false… Content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences, as we clearly explain in our developer documentation.” This comes as Meta has previously secured AI licensing deals with major news outlets like CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc., but these new terms could grant the company access to a significantly broader range of content.

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, commented to Nieman Lab that, “For news publishers, this clearly represents 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.”

Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, clarified on X that the change is not intended to target news sites. He stated, “This update is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites.”

Implications for Businesses

Businesses that do not agree to Meta’s new policies “may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes,” according to the terms. Nieman Lab also highlighted that Meta recently launched a Meta One subscription, requiring businesses and creators to pay for links in posts and reels. This creates a scenario where Meta charges users to post links to content that it may then freely crawl for its AI training.

Update, October 16th: Added a statement from Meta and legal commentary.