Meta recently updated its commercial terms of use to include language stating the company could “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and services.
Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab described that clause as a notable provision that could have allowed Meta to scrape the websites of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the scraped content to train the company’s AI models. While Meta won a high‑profile copyright lawsuit last year, other legal cases against AI companies, including Meta, remain ongoing.
A Meta spokesperson had insisted the revised wording did not change how the company crawls the web. According to a report by The Verge, Meta has since removed the disputed provision from its commercial terms.
In a statement the company said: “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.”
Why this matters
- The phrasing could have materially affected what sources Meta considered eligible for data collection to train AI, especially for publishers who operate a Meta business account.
- The addition and subsequent removal of the clause show that public and expert feedback can influence how large tech companies present and refine their legal terms.
The development is part of a broader debate over big tech data-collection practices, copyright enforcement, and transparency about the sources used to train AI systems.
