Deals & regulation
Meta removes commercial-terms language that raised AI-scraping concerns
Meta removed language from its commercial terms that appeared to authorize using content from business-account websites to develop, train and improve its products. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the wording could have enabled broad scraping of publishers’ sites, raising fresh concerns about AI training and control of web content. Meta said the provision applied only to ads and business products, and that removing it clarified rather than changed how the company uses web crawlers. The report does not establish whether Meta had used the disputed language operationally.
Editorial summary · Publisher article
What matters
- The deleted wording referred broadly to content from business-account domains, pages and URLs.
- Legal experts characterized the provision as unusually expansive and potentially relevant to AI training.
- Meta said the terms concerned ads and business products and did not represent a change in its crawling practices.
Context & caveats
- The report describes the terms change and competing interpretations but does not independently establish Meta’s underlying crawling or training practices.
Why this made the edition
The report identifies a concrete change to Meta’s commercial terms, explains why legal experts found the wording significant, and preserves Meta’s clarification that its web-crawling practices did not change.
Source material