Meta eliminates wording that could have permitted news site data scraping.

In response to criticism, Meta is revising its terms to eliminate wording that implied it could gather content from various websites, including news outlets, for AI training purposes. The specific language that has been removed from the commercial terms page states:

> … 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.

This wording was interpreted by many, including experts in digital law, as an attempt to grant Meta the ability to utilize content scraped from websites for free, potentially overriding any restrictions set by a site’s robots.txt file.

Meta’s vice president of communications, along with spokesperson Daniel Roberts, countered these interpretations, asserting that “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.” The latest update to the terms, along with a new statement, goes further by completely removing the contentious language. In a follow-up statement, Roberts clarified:

> “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. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”