Meta Terms Allow Website Crawling for AI Training

Meta Platforms, Inc. will introduce commercial terms on October 30 that authorize it to crawl websites associated with business accounts and use collected content to train its products, according to Nieman Lab. The terms apply to businesses using services such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

The language permits Meta and entities acting on its behalf to access, index, cache, analyze, and collect website content using automated tools. It also allows Meta to create test credentials, which legal experts said could provide access to content behind registration walls.

Three legal experts who reviewed the terms for Nieman Lab said they could be used to argue that Meta may scrape news sites and train its AI on them. Media lawyer Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy said the provision would give Meta access to material that "would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market." Any such training would still depend on unsettled fair use questions now before US courts.

Businesses cannot opt out of the updated terms while continuing to use Meta products for commercial purposes. Meta said the update consolidates existing language and does not change how its crawlers operate. The company also said website owners can manage crawler access through robots.txt.