Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that legal experts said could have let the company scrape the websites of businesses — including news publishers — and use what it found to train its AI models. TechCrunch reported on Saturday that the provision is gone, following reporting by The Verge, and Meta insists the episode changes nothing about how its web crawlers actually behave.
What the language said
Meta recently updated its commercial terms of use to declare that the company can “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products and services. The updated terms were set to take effect on October 30, and businesses that kept using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for commercial purposes would be consenting to them, with no opt-out short of stopping that business use.
That single sentence drew an unusually sharp reaction. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab called it a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train the company’s AI models.
“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,” said James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, in Nieman Lab’s reporting.
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, put the market value on it: “This is a remarkable provision to bury in terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.” Topic added that it is not clear whether a court would enforce the clause — but that publishers should assume it would be enforceable.
Meta’s response
A Meta spokesperson initially insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web. After the criticism, the company removed the provision and issued a statement: “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. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
What changed — and what did not
Outlets that compared the two versions of the terms reported that the word “train” no longer appears in the crawling provision, and that the stated uses are now tied to advertising and business products. The broader permission to crawl domains associated with a business account, and the October 30 effective date, remain in place.
Nieman Lab, in an October 17 follow-up, offered a cooler assessment of the edit: allowing scraped content to be used for all “advertising and business products” is still, in its reading, a substantial expansion of Meta’s permissions. The argument, in other words, has narrowed rather than ended.
It is also worth being precise about what was never shown. No reporting in this dispute established that Meta actually scraped publisher websites or trained models under the clause; the fight was over what the wording would permit a company of Meta’s scale to claim as already agreed.
Why publishers reacted so fast
The sensitivity has a context. Meta defeated a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement last year, TechCrunch noted, while other cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue. In that environment, a sentence in a terms-of-service update is not read as boilerplate. It is read as a licensing position — which is exactly how three legal experts read this one, and why a quiet edit on a Saturday became the story.
