Meta's updated commercial terms appear to grant the company permission to crawl and scrape websites tied to businesses that use its platforms, a category that includes online news publishers, according to reporting from Nieman Lab. The terms take effect on October 30th. Under the policy, Meta says it can use content pulled from outside domains to develop, improve, and research its products and to train its AI systems.
The language covers business accounts that distribute content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Those businesses authorize Meta and any entity acting on its behalf to deploy automated tools such as scrapers, bots, spiders, and crawlers, and to create test credentials, in order to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, or retrieve their domains, web pages, and URLs. Meta may also pull periodic updates from those sources.
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts described the change as a consolidation of the company's commercial and self-serve advertising terms. He disputed Nieman Lab's characterization, saying the way Meta uses web crawlers has not changed and that content owners can still express their preferences through robots.txt flags, which he said the company explains in its developer documentation. Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, said in a post on X that the update is intended to let Meta pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party sites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, and is not aimed at news sites.
Legal experts told Nieman Lab the terms could carry broader consequences. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, said the language reads as permission for Meta to train AI on content from news publishers' sites and possibly to deploy some of that content in competition with those publishers. Nieman Lab also noted that the commercial terms could let Meta argue its agreements override other blocking instructions, such as a site's robots.txt file, potentially letting it bypass a licensing deal.
The terms state that businesses which do not accept the new policies may lose all access to or use of Meta's products for business or commercial purposes. Meta has previously signed AI licensing agreements with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc., following a similar path taken by OpenAI. Nieman Lab observed that Meta recently launched a Meta One subscription requiring businesses and creators to pay to include links in posts and reels, meaning the company has begun charging users to post links to content it would be permitted to crawl at no cost.
The story was updated on October 16th to include a statement from Meta and commentary from legal experts.
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