THE CRUNCH
Meta has revised new commercial terms for business accounts after publishers objected to language that would have let the company scrape websites linked to Facebook or Instagram business profiles. The original wording, flagged by Nieman Lab and due to take effect on 30 October, said Meta could use web scrapers and similar automated tools to access and crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with business accounts, and use any content from them to develop, research and train its products.
The revised terms drop the word "train" and now say scraping serves "to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products." Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had "clarified" the language so it applies only to ads and business products, adding that the changes "were not about scraping news sites" and that how Meta uses web crawlers is not changing.
That has not settled the matter. Nieman Lab's follow-up describes the terms as still "a substantial expansion of Meta's scraping permissions," and legal experts it spoke to said Meta could scrape news websites with seemingly few restrictions under the revised wording. Stone's claim that the changes do not override robots.txt preferences, the standard file sites use to signal crawler rules, carries limited weight because robots.txt is not legally binding.
Publishers' wariness has history: Meta stopped paying for news in 2022, killed its dedicated news tab in 2024, and has more recently cut deals with outlets to supply news content for its AI chatbot. Industry groups are now pushing back, with News/Media Alliance chief executive Danielle Coffey calling the rules "outrageous and probably illegal" and the News Media Association's Theo Bamber describing them to Press Gazette as a "shameless landgrab attempt."
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