Meta’s updated commercial terms, taking effect October 30, will authorize the company to deploy web scrapers against websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to a Nieman Lab report. The change affects any organization operating a Meta business account, including most news publishers.
The new terms permit Meta to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” domains and web pages connected to a business account, and to “periodically pull updates” from them. Business accounts cover a broad set of activities, including managing a Page, running ads, pushing marketing messages, and using Meta Business Suite or Ads Manager. The terms state that Meta may use collected content to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products, and the company’s terms of service define “AI at Meta” as one of those products.
Three legal experts who reviewed the terms for Nieman Lab said the language could be read to authorize training Meta’s AI on scraped publisher content. “This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. He added that it remains unclear whether a court would enforce the provision, but publishers should assume it would be.
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said the terms could be read even more broadly. “On the broadest possible interpretation, this would be used to develop a comprehensive archive of all content that Meta would then serve as it wanted to directly or through AI,” he said.
Business accounts currently have no option to opt out ahead of the October 30 effective date. The updated terms state that any party that disagrees must “stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.” Benjamin Sobel, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, compared the structure to tying arrangements in antitrust law, since continued use of Meta’s business products requires accepting the scraping permissions.
The terms also authorize Meta to “create test credentials” to access covered domains, which Grimmelmann said would technically let the company “sign up as a fake user” to bypass registration walls.
A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab that the update consolidates crawling language previously scattered across other terms of use, that it will not change how Meta crawls publishers going forward, and that site owners can still manage access through robots.txt. Legal experts said the new terms nonetheless create an opening for Meta to argue its commercial terms supersede robots.txt instructions.
The update follows Meta’s rollout of “Meta One,” a subscription program that limits the number of external links certain Facebook and Instagram accounts can post without subscribing. Stephen Beale, founder and editor of “The Steampunk Explorer,” told Nieman Lab he is considering shutting down his Meta accounts ahead of the change. “I know my site has been scraped to death,” he said. “It just seems like such an arrogant, in-your-face move on [Meta’s] part.”
Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.
