Meta is revising its commercial terms to delete sections implying the company could scrape website content to train artificial intelligence. The specific language concerning the use of data from domains, web pages, or URLs has been removed from the official terms page.
Analysts Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann previously argued the wording gave Meta a free license to use scraped data for AI products. Critics also suggested the terms were intended to override blocking instructions found in a site's robots.txt file.
Meta issued a new statement on 17 October to address these concerns. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts stated, "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false."
Roberts added, "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."
