Meta's new commercial terms accused of allowing scraping of publisher content to train AI, with related wording later removed
According to Nieman Lab, Meta's new business terms taking effect on October 30, 2026 allow it to use crawlers to scrape website content associated with business accounts to develop, improve, and train its AI products. Ars Technica subsequently reported that the terms require business accounts to authorize Meta's crawlers to access content on their linked websites, with no opt-out; legal experts said this could be used to bypass paying news organizations millions of dollars in licensing fees, and criticized it as allowing Meta to scrape content from news sites and other publishers for free. On October 17, 2026, The Verge reported that Meta updated its business terms, removing wording interpreted as permitting scraping of content including news websites for AI training—wording that Cornell digital and information law professor James Grimmelmann and others had said could override robots.txt blocking instructions. On October 18, TechCrunch confirmed that Meta removed the language in its commercial services terms allowing the use of business-account website content to develop, improve, and train its products. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts responded that the crawler terms only apply to advertising and business products, that the company's use of web crawlers has not changed, and that content owners can still express preferences via robots.txt.
