Meta deleted one word from its business terms after publishers complained. Three law professors say the scraping permission is still there.
Meta's new commercial terms let it crawl any site tied to a business account. After backlash it cut the word 'train' and narrowed the purpose. The part about which sites it can crawl didn't change.
Meta’s updated commercial terms start on October 30. They apply to anyone who uses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads for business, and that includes nearly every newsroom. On October 15, Nieman Lab pointed out one sentence in them. Two days later Meta changed it. What the changed version does depends on which half of the sentence you read.
The sentence, before and after
The original text let Meta, or anyone acting for it, run scrapers, bots and crawlers over “the domains, web pages, or URLs” associated with your products or services, and to create “test credentials” to get in. Then it said Meta “may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products.
The revised text, published the afternoon of October 16 according to Nieman Lab, keeps the crawling permission and rewrites the purpose.
| Original (archived October 5) | Revised | |
|---|---|---|
| What Meta can crawl | Sites “associated with your products or services” | Same wording |
| Why | Provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain Meta products | Provide, develop, improve, research and maintain “advertising and business products” |
| “Train” | Listed | Removed |
| Robots.txt | Not mentioned | Not mentioned |
The Verge reported the next morning that the original sentence was gone entirely, and TechCrunch confirmed the removal. Both are describing the same edit. The “may use any content” sentence disappeared, and a purpose clause now sits inside the crawling sentence instead.
What Meta says
A spokesperson told The Verge and Nieman Lab: “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. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
Meta also says the language was moved over from its Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, so it’s tidying, not expanding. Nieman Lab checked that claim against the older text. The old terms did allow crawling, but only in one situation, when an account used Meta’s generative AI features to run ads, and only to “optimize your ads.” Putting the permission into the general terms and widening the purpose to all “advertising and business products” is, in the outlet’s words, a substantial expansion.
Why the lawyers aren’t satisfied
Nieman Lab asked three legal experts about the revision. None said it solved the problem.
Matt Topic, a media attorney at Loevy & Loevy, said the new version “still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’” That isn’t a defined term, and he figures Meta is building AI business products, so “‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’”
James Grimmelmann at Cornell Law School said the phrase “is still broad enough to drive a truck through,” and that nothing restricts the “associated with your products or services” wording “that would let Meta scrape entire sites.”
Benjamin Sobel at the University of Wisconsin took on the robots.txt reassurance. Robots.txt states a preference. Unless that preference is legally enforceable, he said, “it can still be ignored all the same.” The revised terms contain no promise to honor it.
There’s also no opt-out. Business accounts either accept the terms on October 30 or stop using Meta’s products for business.
My read
I can’t tell you what Meta’s crawlers will do after October 30, and nobody outside the company can yet. What I can compare is the text. A contract is the thing a publisher can point to later. A spokesperson’s statement isn’t. Meta’s public line is that robots.txt still works, but that promise is not in the document businesses are being asked to accept.
It’s fair to say Meta backed off quickly, and that it dropped the most explicit word. I’d still want a sentence that says “we will respect robots.txt” before calling this closed. Until then, the dispute is about the gap between what a company says and what it signs you up for.
The pressure isn’t only coming from lawyers. The European Publishers Council said it would ask EU authorities to look at copyright and market power. The UK News Media Association called for ministers to step in. The US News/Media Alliance called the terms “outrageous and probably illegal.” Whether any regulator acts before October 30 is the thing to watch. Courts are also still sorting out what counts as fair use for AI training; the Third Circuit’s ruling on Westlaw headnotes is the one appeals-level decision so far, and it covers a narrow case.
Meta had not answered Nieman Lab’s follow-up questions about the revision, including whether the test credentials could get past paywalls, when that story went up.
Sources
- Nieman Lab: Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say, October 15, 2026 (I couldn’t open this page directly; details come from the follow-up story and wire summaries)
- Nieman Lab: Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes, October 17, 2026
- Meta: Commercial Terms (updated version, effective October 30, 2026)
- The Verge: Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites
- TechCrunch: Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns, October 17, 2026
- News/Media Alliance: Changes to Meta commercial terms of use