Meta's new business terms could let it train AI on publishers' sites
Meta's new commercial terms, which take effect October 30, let it crawl websites tied to business accounts and use that content to "train" its products, Nieman Lab and Ars Technica reported. Legal experts said the terms could be used to train AI on news sites. Meta says nothing changes in how its crawlers work.
Meta's updated commercial terms, which take effect Oct. 30, let the company crawl websites "associated with" business accounts on its platforms and use that content to train its products, Nieman Lab and Ars Technica reported. The terms cover businesses and public figures that manage Facebook pages, Instagram profiles, Messenger accounts or WhatsApp channels, including news publishers, Nieman Lab reported.
The new language says "Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" its products, Nieman Lab and Ars reported. Businesses cannot opt out. "If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes," the update reads, according to Nieman Lab.
Three legal experts who reviewed the terms for Nieman Lab said they could be used to argue that Meta may scrape news sites to train its AI. "This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market," said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property lawyer at Loevy & Loevy, according to Nieman Lab. Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann said a clause on "test credentials" could let Meta "sign up as a fake user" to get past registration walls, Nieman Lab reported.
Ars compared the old and new terms and reported that Meta's current commercial terms do not mention "test credentials." Asked about earlier uses, a Meta spokesperson pointed Ars to a seller agreement that uses similar wording for a narrower purpose, Ars reported.
Meta disputes the reading. "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false," a spokesperson said, according to Ars. A spokesperson said the update only gathers crawling language from several older terms into one place and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt," Nieman Lab reported. Meta communications chief Andy Stone wrote on X that the change is about product listings, "not about scraping news sites," The Verge reported.
What we know: Meta's new terms let it crawl sites tied to business accounts and use the content to train its products.
What we don't: Whether Meta will use the terms to get around publishers' blocks, and whether a court would enforce them.
Where outlets agree Nieman Lab and Ars Technica both report that Meta's new terms let it crawl sites tied to business accounts and use the content for training.
Where they differ The outlets cited here report the same key facts so far.