Meta has revised upcoming terms for business accounts after publishers and other businesses raised concerns that the company could use them to broadly scrape websites connected to Facebook and Instagram accounts.
As reported by Engadget, Meta removed an explicit reference to AI training from the updated commercial terms. However, the revised language still gives the company permission to use automated tools to access and collect content from websites associated with business accounts.
The terms are scheduled to take effect on October 30.
Original Terms Included AI Training
Nieman Lab first highlighted the changes after Meta added language allowing it to use web scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers, and other automated software to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, and retrieve content from websites linked to business accounts.
The original wording said Meta could use that material to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity” of its products and services.
That raised concerns because most major digital publishers maintain business accounts on Facebook or Instagram, potentially bringing their websites under the terms.
Meta Removes the Word “Train”
Meta later quietly revised the terms again.
The company removed the word “train” and narrowed the stated purpose of scraping to supporting, developing, improving, researching, and maintaining its advertising and business products.
The updated terms still authorize Meta and entities acting on its behalf to use automated software to crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with businesses and periodically pull updates from them.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had clarified the language to show that the changes apply only to its advertising and business products.
He also said the update was “not about scraping news sites” and that Meta was not changing how it currently uses web crawlers.
Legal Experts Still See Broader Scraping Rights
Despite the revision, Nieman Lab reported that the new language still represents a significant expansion of Meta’s scraping permissions.
Several legal experts told the publication that the revised terms appear to give Meta broad permission to scrape news websites with relatively few restrictions.
Stone said the changes do not give Meta new rights to override website owners’ robots.txt preferences.
However, robots.txt instructions are not legally binding, and AI companies have previously been accused of ignoring or working around them.
Publishers Push Back
The dispute comes amid Meta’s strained relationship with news publishers.
The company stopped paying publishers for news in 2022 and removed its dedicated news tab in 2024. More recently, Meta has signed agreements with several publishers to supply news content to its AI chatbot.
Media industry groups have strongly criticized the new terms.
Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, called the rules “outrageous and probably illegal.”
Theo Bamber, head of the UK’s News Media Association, described the changes as a “shameless landgrab attempt.”
Meta maintains that the revised terms concern only its advertising and business products, but publishers continue to question how broadly the company will be able to scrape content from websites connected to Meta business accounts.
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