After pushback from publishers and industry groups, Meta narrowed terms that appeared to let it scrape news sites for AI training
Meta has rewritten its commercial terms again. The change removes language that appeared to let the company scrape content from outside websites, including news sites, and use it to train its AI.
The rollback followed sharp backlash from publishers and legal observers. For a company that has signed paid AI licensing deals with media outlets, the original wording looked a lot like a way to skip the paywall entirely.
The deleted passage was broad. It covered content from domains, web pages, or URLs connected to Meta’s commercial services, and it listed a long set of permitted uses.
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.
That clause no longer appears on the commercial terms page. The word doing the heavy lifting was “train,” which is what drew attention.
The revised Commercial Terms carry an effective date of October 30, 2026. As first written, they authorized a wide range of automated tools to crawl and scrape data from URLs tied to business accounts on Meta’s platforms.
Those platforms include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Meta responded with a clarification around October 16-17, 2026. The updated version limits the scraping permissions to advertising and business products.
Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy.
It also strips out the language allowing AI training. In addition, Meta affirmed that it respects existing web protocols such as robots.txt.
The News/Media Alliance, an industry group representing publishers, called the initial terms “outrageous.” It also described them as a potential violation of legal standards.
Other industry voices went further, calling the original terms an abuse of market power. The argument rests on how dependent many newsrooms are on Meta’s platforms for distribution.
The licensing angle sharpens the complaint. Meta has established paid AI licensing agreements with media outlets including CNN and Fox News.
Those deals show the company is willing to pay for news content in some cases. Legal experts suggested the original wording could enable scraping news sites for AI training potentially worth “many millions” in licensing fees. That made the original terms look like a potential free alternative to the very contracts Meta has been signing.
For publishers, the revision is a meaningful but narrow win. The AI training language is gone, scraping permissions are confined to advertising and business products, and robots.txt is acknowledged.
For Meta, the episode carries reputational cost. The company relies on news outlets as both platform users and, in some cases, paid licensing partners.
The speed of Meta’s reversal stands out. The clarification arrived before the October 30 effective date, suggesting the company preferred to fix the wording rather than defend it through a prolonged public fight.