Meta removes terms wording that experts said could allow it to scrape news sites for AI

Meta has removed language from its commercial terms of use that legal experts said could have allowed it to scrape content from websites, including news sites, to train its AI products, The Verge and TechCrunch reported on Saturday (US time).

The deleted clause said Meta could use content from the domains, web pages or URLs of businesses using its services “to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and features.

Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab, and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, said the wording appeared to give Meta permission to use content from publishers with Meta business accounts to train its AI models, The Verge reported.

Meta had earlier said there was no change to how it uses web crawlers. In a follow-up statement to The Verge, spokesperson Daniel Roberts said: “We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves.” He said content owners can still use robots.txt files to signal their preferences and that the updates “don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”

Nieman Lab reported that some legal experts said the revised terms still grant broad scraping permissions despite the change.