Meta's new terms may let it train AI on news sites for free

Meta has revised its commercial terms, and according to an analysis by Nieman Lab, the new wording effectively grants it the right to crawl and scrape the content of websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms — online publishers included. The terms take effect on October 30^th and explicitly state that harvested content may be used to "develop, improve, research," and "train" the company's AI products.

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts insists this is merely a "consolidation" of its advertising terms — the commercial and self-serve ones. Legal experts who spoke to Nieman Lab, however, believe the new language could let Meta argue that its commercial terms override other blocking instructions, such as a site's robots.txt file. In practice, that opens the door to bypassing licensing agreements and freely training models on publishers' material.

What the terms actually permit

The rules apply to business accounts promoting their content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. By accepting them, a user authorizes Meta (or anyone acting on its behalf) to deploy automated software — scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers — to access the domains, pages, and URLs "associated" with their products or services, to index and analyze their content, and to periodically pull updates. Any such content Meta may use to provide, develop, and maintain its products.

Roberts pushes back on Nieman Lab's reporting, saying there is no change to how Meta's crawlers operate and that content owners can still signal their preferences through robots.txt, as the developer documentation explains.

The context for publishers

Following OpenAI, Meta has already struck AI licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc. But the new terms could give it access to a far broader swath of material — with no deals at all. "For news publishers, this clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves," says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell.

Businesses that refuse the new policies risk losing access to Meta's products for commercial purposes. Meanwhile, last month the company launched a Meta One subscription that requires businesses and creators to pay to include links in posts and reels. As Nieman Lab wryly puts it, Meta has begun charging users to post links to the very content it will be allowed to crawl for free.

Source: The Verge