Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes

Why it matters

Meta quietly revised its upcoming terms of service for business accounts after Nieman Lab revealed that the new terms would authorize broad scraping of websites linked to those accounts, with scraped content potentially feeding AI training. The revision, published after the initial report, drops the word "train" from the list of permitted uses and narrows them to advertising and business products rather than all Meta offerings. However, the terms still authorize wide-ranging crawling of associated domains, and Meta has added no explicit language promising to honor robots.txt preferences, despite a spokesperson's claim that site owners can block the crawler that way. Legal experts remain skeptical. Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy argues that "develop" is broad enough to cover training, and that "business product" is undefined. Because nearly every news organization operates at least one Meta business account, and the terms take effect on October 30 with no opt-out, publishers have little leverage beyond public pressure.