Language that experts claim enabled the scraping of news sites for AI training has been excised from Meta’s terms of service.
In response to significant backlash, Meta is updating its terms to eliminate language that implied the company could harvest content from websites, including news outlets, to train its artificial intelligence. The specific language previously stated that "Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms."
Many observers, including Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, interpreted this passage as an attempt to grant Meta the unrestricted right to utilize scraped content for AI product training without compensation, effectively overriding blocking instructions found in a site's robots.txt file.
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts refuted these claims, asserting that "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false."
Roberts explained in a follow-up statement to The Verge that the update clarifies that the consolidated crawling terms only applied to advertising and business products. He emphasized that the changes do not alter how Meta uses web crawlers and reiterated that content owners can utilize robots.txt to signal their preferences. The company maintains that these updates do not grant new rights that supersede those preferences.
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