Meta's Updated Commercial Terms Allow Scraping of Business Account Websites for AI Training

Meta $META is updating its commercial terms effective October 30, authorizing the company to use automated web scrapers, crawlers, and bots to collect content from external websites and URLs associated with business accounts across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Three legal experts who reviewed the update for Nieman Lab stated the language could be used to argue Meta has permission to scrape news publishers' websites to train its AI products, as the company defines "AI at Meta" among the products covered by the terms. The updated terms provide no opt-out mechanism, instructing businesses that disagree with the scraping permissions to stop all commercial use of Meta's platforms, while also authorizing Meta to generate "test credentials" that Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann said could technically allow it to bypass registration walls. A Meta spokesperson stated that the update consolidates existing crawling language into one place without changing how the company crawls publishers, adding that website owners can still manage access using robots.txt files, though legal experts warned the commercial contract could be used to supersede those technical blocks. The policy shift follows Meta's rollout of its Meta One subscription service, which restricts how many external links certain accounts can post on Facebook and Instagram without paying, even as the company expands its own model ecosystem after releasing its 816B-parameter Muse Spark Open model. "For news publishers, this clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves." — James Grimmelmann, Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Law School.