Meta’s new commercial terms could give the company permission to crawl and scrape the websites linked to business accounts on its platforms, including news sites, and use that material to train its AI products. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the update, which takes effect October 30, appears to reach well beyond the social media posts that businesses publish on Facebook and Instagram.
The update does not give businesses a way to opt out. Instead, the terms say companies that won’t agree to let Meta’s bots freely crawl their linked content should stop using Meta’s services altogether.
The language is broad. Under the revised terms, businesses authorize Meta “or any entity acting on our behalf” to use “automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents)” to access and collect content from web pages associated with their products or services. The terms also say Meta may use that content to “provide, develop, improve, research, train” its products. The word “AI” does not appear anywhere in the text, but Nieman Lab reported that the reference to training and the description of automated scraping point to it.
News publishers have the most to lose. Virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, and publishers could, in theory, charge Meta millions of dollars in licensing fees for access to their archives. Several news groups are already fighting OpenAI in court over whether training AI on articles without a license counts as fair use. Meta’s terms, the experts said, could give the company a path around that fight.
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that for news publishers, the language “clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites.” He added that Meta could possibly deploy that content “even in competition with the publishers themselves.” Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, called the provision “a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service,” given that it would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.
Several legal experts also said it is unclear whether a court would enforce the terms. Still, they told Nieman Lab the language could be used to argue that Meta can scrape news sites and use that content to train its AI products. Some warned that Meta could invoke its commercial terms to override robots.txt files, the standard tool publishers use to block crawlers.
The timing raises further questions. Last month, Meta launched a subscription called Meta One that requires businesses and creators to pay to include links in their posts and reels. Nieman Lab noted that the company is effectively charging users to post links to content it will be permitted to crawl for free.
Meta has pushed back on that reading. A company spokesperson, Daniel Roberts, said the update is a consolidation of commercial and self-serve ad terms, and that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.” He added that “content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences.” Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, wrote on X that the 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.”
The company has said that language about crawling was previously scattered across several policies, including terms about generative AI in ads. Meta’s blog post said the changes “reduce overlap between our agreements and improve the clarity of the terms that apply to your use of our products.”
Not everyone is convinced. Ars Technica compared the current terms with the new version and found that the so-called streamlining introduces fresh language and broader provisions. Specifically, the phrase “test credentials” does not appear in Meta’s current commercial terms, the outlet found. Meta later pointed to a seller agreement that uses similar language, but that policy applies only to sellers using Meta’s e-commerce products and is limited to retrieving product information. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the combined terms look more like “tying,” an antitrust concept in which a company requires a customer to accept a second product as a condition of buying the first. They compared it to Google’s earlier practice of requiring websites to allow scraping for AI Overviews if they wanted to be indexed for general search. Google has since begun allowing opt-outs.
Nieman Lab is now asking news publishers whether the update could push them to scale back their presence on Meta platforms. Some individual users are already weighing a departure. Stephen Beale, founder and editor of The Steampunk Explorer, depends on Facebook for traffic and said he is considering quitting the platform. He said his website has already been “scraped to death,” but the update struck him as “such an arrogant, in-your-face move.”
“It just makes me angry, and I don’t want them to get away with it,” Beale said.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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