Meta Removes Commercial Terms Language That Sparked News Scraping Backlash

Meta has removed disputed language from its updated commercial terms following backlash that the wording suggested the company could scrape web content, including news sites, to train its AI models. The deleted clause had stated that Meta could use content from domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, and train Meta Company Products and services. Critics, including Nieman Lab and Cornell digital and information law professor James Grimmelmann, had interpreted the clause as an effort to allow free AI training on scraped content and override blocking instructions in a website's robots.txt file. Meta VP of communications Andy Stone and spokesperson Daniel Roberts previously denied any change to how the company uses web crawlers, before Meta updated the page to strip out the contested wording and clarify that the consolidated crawling terms applied only to ads and business products. "As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences." — Daniel Roberts, Meta spokesperson.