Meta grants itself rights to scrape news publishers for AI training data

Meta has rewritten its business terms of service in a way that appears to let the company crawl and train AI on content from websites tied to any business using its platforms, including news publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms take effect on October 30th and apply to business accounts that promote their content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

The terms state that businesses authorize Meta to use automated software, including web scrapers and crawlers, to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” domains and web pages associated with their products or services. Meta says it can use any content pulled from those pages to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products and features. Legal experts tell Nieman Lab the language could let Meta argue its commercial terms override other blocking signals, such as a site’s robots.txt file, a text file that tells automated crawlers which pages they may not visit. That would let Meta train on publisher content even where a licensing deal or a robots.txt block says otherwise.

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts disputes that reading. He says the company is simply “consolidating” its commercial and self-serve ad terms, and that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.” He adds that publishers can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences, as described in Meta’s developer documentation. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, wrote on X that the update is meant to help Meta pull accurate product information from third-party sites for ad and content recommendations, not to scrape news sites.

Nieman Lab’s legal sources see it differently. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, says the terms represent permission for Meta to train AI on any content from a publisher’s site, and possibly to deploy that content in ways that compete with the publisher. Meta has already struck AI licensing deals with outlets including CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc., following a path OpenAI has also taken. But the new terms could give Meta access to a far wider range of publisher content than those existing deals cover.

The timing adds friction. Businesses that don’t accept Meta’s updated policies risk losing access to its products for commercial use, the terms say. Last month, Meta introduced a Meta One subscription that charges businesses and creators to include links in their posts and reels. Nieman Lab points out the tension: Meta would be charging publishers to link to the same content it could crawl for free.

What to watch next is whether publishers test the new terms by tightening robots.txt rules once the policy takes effect on October 30th, and whether Meta issues clearer guidance distinguishing product pages from news content. Any legal challenge from a publisher with an existing licensing agreement would also test how far Meta’s new language actually reaches.