Meta updated its commercial terms of use, and according to Harvard's Nieman Lab, the new wording may let it scrape news sites and use their content to train its AI products. Under the terms, businesses that keep using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp consent to Meta scraping their websites.
Why it concerns every news site
Almost every news organization has at least one Meta business account. Three legal experts told Nieman Lab the terms could be used to argue that Meta may scrape content from these sites, and perhaps even that they override blocks in robots.txt, the file sites use to tell crawlers what they may not crawl.
Meta: "This is not about scraping news sites"
After publication Meta changed the wording and removed the word "train". According to Meta, it is only merging its generative AI ad terms into its general terms, and the updates "don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences". But according to Nieman Lab, even the updated wording still allows broad scraping of any site "associated with" a business account. News/Media Alliance president Danielle Coffey called the terms "outrageous and probably illegal".
What it means for us
The debate directly concerns every content site, including Techwire. News sites can still block Meta's crawler through robots.txt, but whether courts would enforce such terms, and whether using content to train models is legal, remains open. It is another chapter in the struggle between AI companies and the content creators they rely on.
