Meta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free

Meta’s new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites “associated” with the businesses that use its platforms — including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to “develop, improve, research,” and “train” its AI products.

While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says that the company is just “consolidating” its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts tell Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta “to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” like a site’s robots.txt file. That could potentially allow Meta to bypass a licensing agreement and freely train its AI models on content posted by online publishers.

The new policy applies to business accounts that promote their content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.

Roberts pushes back on Nieman Lab’s reporting, saying “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false… Content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences, as we clearly explain in our developer documentation.” Meta has followed OpenAI in striking AI licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc., but these terms could give the company access to a much broader swath of content.

“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, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, tells Nieman Lab.

Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, writes in a post on X that this change isn’t meant to target news sites. “This update is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites.”

Businesses that don’t agree to Meta’s new policies “may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes,” the terms say. Last month, Meta launched a new Meta One subscription that requires businesses and creators to pay to include links in posts and reels. “Put another way, Meta has begun charging users to post links to the same content that it will be permitted to crawl for free,” Nieman Lab says.

Update, October 16th: Added a statement from Meta and legal commentary.