Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that appeared to give the company the right to scrape content from websites, including news sites, to train its artificial intelligence products. The change came after a wave of criticism over the wording.
The deleted passage said Meta “may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs” to provide, develop, improve, research and train its products, services and features. Critics read it as an attempt to use scraped content for free and to supersede blocking instructions in a site’s robots.txt file. Among those who raised concerns were Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell.
Meta first pushed back. Andy Stone, the company’s vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts said, “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
The latest update goes further. Meta has now taken the controversial language out of the terms entirely, along with a new statement. Roberts said in a follow-up statement to The Verge that the crawling terms “only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves.” He added, “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Roberts also pointed to the tools available to site owners. “As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences,” he said. “This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
The reversal shows how quickly wording in a terms-of-service page can become a public dispute when it touches on AI training and publisher content. Meta’s position now rests on the claim that robots.txt remains the operative control for publishers.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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