Meta revises commercial terms following concerns over AI scraping of news websites

Meta has revised its commercial terms to remove language that raised concerns about the potential use of news websites to train artificial intelligence models.

The revised terms, scheduled to take effect on Oct. 30, specify that automated website crawling is intended to develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and business products.

The provisions still allow Meta to use automated tools, including web scrapers, bots and crawlers, to access and collect content from websites associated with businesses using its platforms.

An earlier version of the proposed terms included language about using collected material to "train" Meta products, prompting concerns among publishers and legal experts over the potential use of copyrighted news content for AI development.

Meta subsequently removed the reference and clarified that the crawling provisions apply to advertising and business products.

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the changes do not alter the company's existing crawling practices and that website owners can continue using robots.txt instructions to indicate their access preferences.

Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone also rejected suggestions that the update was intended to enable scraping of news websites, saying it was designed to retrieve accurate product information for advertising and content recommendations.