Meta's new commercial terms let it crawl business users' websites, and publishers are pushing back

Meta Platforms’ updated Commercial Terms, which take effect Oct. 30, authorize the Menlo Park, Calif., company and anyone acting on its behalf to use automated tools to crawl websites associated with businesses that use its products, and to use that content to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain” its products, Nieman Lab reported on Thursday.

Legal experts who reviewed the terms for Nieman Lab said the language could support an argument that Meta may scrape news sites and use the content to train its AI products. “This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. The terms also let Meta create “test credentials” to reach those pages, which Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann said could let it sign up as a user to get past registration walls.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X on Friday that the update is meant to let Meta pull accurate information about products sold on third-party websites and is “not about scraping news sites,” Search Engine Journal reported. A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab that site owners can still manage access with robots.txt.

Search Engine Journal noted that Meta’s advertising terms already let it crawl advertisers’ sites; the new language extends that to businesses that do not buy ads, including accounts that manage Pages and groups or use Meta’s business tools. The European Publishers Council said it is writing to the European Commission about the change.