Experts told Nieman Lab the revision leaves the door open. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said the change "does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites". Attorney Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy added that the revised terms still allow Meta to use scraped content to develop any "business product", an undefined term, and that "develop" is broad enough to include "train".

The original concern was that the commercial terms could let Meta argue they supersede other blocking instructions, such as the robots.txt file that sites have historically used to tell scrapers, including search engines, what they may crawl. Meta maintains that is not the intent. Spokesperson Daniel Roberts said in a statement to The Verge that "content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences" and that the update "is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences".