Meta drops its scraping clause after outcry⁠.

Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that experts said allowed it to scrape content from websites, including news sites, to train its AI¹. The change follows a backlash against an update Meta made to those terms only recently¹².

The removed line said Meta may use any content from a business account's domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of its products and services¹. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab called it a remarkable provision that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train its models².

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, was among those who read it as an attempt to give Meta the right to use scraped content for free¹. The worry was that the terms would override the blocking instructions a site sets in its robots.txt file¹.

At first Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, and the spokesperson Daniel Roberts denied it, saying there was no change to how Meta uses web crawlers, and that any suggestion to the contrary was false¹. The new update goes further and takes the language out entirely¹.

In a follow-up statement, Roberts said the crawling terms Meta had consolidated applied only to its ads and business products, and that the terms now say so¹. He said content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences, and that the updates give Meta no new rights that supersede them¹. The question sits in a live area of law: Meta defeated a high-profile copyright lawsuit last year, but other cases against AI companies, Meta among them, continue².

Read the terms you click through

Nothing in the reporting gives a British angle, and no UK regulator has said anything about it. The lesson travels anyway. A line about training on your content arrived inside commercial terms that many firms accept without reading, because they want to run ads. It took outside lawyers to notice it, and a public fuss to remove it.

If your company has a Meta business account, the practical point is narrow and cheap. Know what your robots.txt file says about AI crawlers, since that is the preference Meta now says it honours. Then ask who in the business reads the terms when a platform updates them, because the next clause like this will arrive the same way, quietly, in a document nobody opens.

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