Meta removes terms language critics said could allow scraping of news sites for AI
After backlash, Meta has deleted a passage from its commercial terms that experts read as a right to use scraped web content to train its AI. The company says the terms only applied to its ads and business products.
Technology company Meta on 17 October updated its commercial terms again, removing wording that experts interpreted as an attempt to claim the right to use content from websites, including news sites, to train its artificial intelligence (AI) products. The change was reported by the tech outlet The Verge.
What was removed
The terms no longer say that Meta may use any content from the relevant domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research and train its products, services and features, and to maintain their integrity.
How experts read it
Several observers criticised the passage, including Neiman Lab, a journalism research project, and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. They read it as an effort to use scraped site content for AI training without payment and to override the blocking instructions that site owners put in a robots.txt file. That file is how a website tells automated tools whether they may collect its content.
Meta's response
Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts initially rejected the criticism, saying nothing had changed in how Meta uses web crawlers. After today's update, Roberts told The Verge in a statement that the consolidated crawling terms applied only to the company's ads and business products, and that this has now been clarified in the terms themselves.
He stressed that this does not change how Meta uses web crawlers, and that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences. According to him, the matter is not about scraping news sites, and the updates give the company no new rights that would override those preferences.
