Meta revises new commercial terms on content scraping after publisher backlash
Meta has removed a reference to AI training from planned business account terms, but questions remain over its right to scrape websites. Publishers and media groups continue to criticize the rules.
Meta, the social media company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has altered its planned commercial terms for business accounts after a swift backlash from publishers and other businesses. The terms take effect on October 30. A reference to AI training was removed, but concerns persist over the company's right to scrape website content.
What the terms say
Meta first shared the update last week. As Nieman Lab flagged, the text said the company could use automated tools to access, index, cache, analyze and collect the domains, web pages and URLs linked to business accounts. That content could also be used to develop Meta products and to "train" them.
The worry was that the wording seemed to let Meta scrape any website whose owner also holds a business account on Facebook or Instagram, a group covering most digital publishers.
Meta then edited the text again. It removed the word "train" and specified that scraping serves to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and business products, as well as to maintain the integrity and security of Meta products.
Company response and criticism
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the language had been "clarified" to show the terms apply only to ads and business products. He said the changes were not about scraping news sites and that the company is not changing how it uses web crawlers.
Nieman Lab nonetheless reports that the terms remain a substantial expansion of Meta's scraping permissions. Legal experts told the outlet that Meta could scrape news sites with seemingly few restrictions. Stone pointed to robots.txt, the file site owners use to signal their preferences, but it is not legally binding, and AI companies regularly ignore it.
Meta's relationship with news publishers has already been strained. It stopped paying for news in 2022, shut its dedicated news tab in 2024, and has recently struck a handful of deals with outlets to supply news for its AI chatbot.
Danielle Coffey, CEO of the US-based News/Media Alliance, called the rules "outrageous and probably illegal". Theo Bamber, the top executive of the UK's News Media Association, described them to Press Gazette as a "shameless landgrab attempt".
