Meta’s updated policies could enable free AI training using news content.
Meta’s updated terms seem to grant it the ability to crawl and scrape websites linked to businesses using its platforms, including online publishers. These changes, effective October 30th, allow Meta to utilize external content for purposes like developing, improving, researching, and training its AI products.
While a Meta spokesperson claims the company is merely “consolidating” its ad terms, legal experts suggest this could enable Meta to argue that its commercial terms take precedence over other restrictions, such as a site’s robots.txt file. This could potentially let Meta bypass licensing agreements and freely train its AI models on content from online publishers.
The new policy specifically targets business accounts promoting content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger:
> You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
Roberts counters the concerns raised, asserting that there is no change in how Meta employs web crawlers and that content owners can still use robots.txt flags to express their preferences, as outlined in their developer documentation. While Meta has previously established AI licensing agreements with various news organizations, these new terms could broaden its access to a wider range of content.
James Grimmelmann, a digital and information law professor at Cornell, notes that for news publishers, this clearly allows Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and potentially use that content in competition with the publishers themselves.
Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, clarified that this update is not aimed at news sites but is intended to ensure accurate information about products on third-party websites for ad and content recommendations.
Businesses that do not accept Meta’s new policies may lose access to its products for commercial purposes. Recently, Meta introduced a new subscription service that requires businesses and creators to pay for including links in posts and reels, effectively charging users to post links to content that Meta can crawl for free.
