Meta drops "train" from its new business terms after publishers push back, but the scraping permission stays broad

Meta's updated commercial terms take effect October 30 and apply to any business account, including Facebook Pages, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp channels. As first written, they said Meta could crawl websites "associated with" those accounts and use the content to "train" its products. Nieman Lab reported this on Thursday, and the News/Media Alliance, the UK News Media Association and the European Publishers Council objected. On Friday afternoon Meta changed the wording. The word "train" is gone, and the crawling is now limited to "advertising and business products." Meta says it still respects robots.txt and isn't changing how it crawls, but that promise isn't written into the terms. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that "develop... business products" is still broad enough to cover AI work. There's no way to opt out before October 30.

What this means for you

If you run a website and manage any Meta business account, these terms cover you on October 30 whether you click anything or not. Checking costs nothing. The safest move is to make sure your robots.txt says what you actually want for Meta's crawlers, since Meta says it honors that file.

Sources

• Nieman Lab follow-up
• TechCrunch
• The Verge