Meta’s new terms may allow AI training on news sites without licenses

Meta’s new commercial terms, which apply to business accounts using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, authorize automated software to access and collect content from pages associated with those businesses and use it to develop, research, and train products. The update takes effect October 30 and provides no specific option to block only this collection; businesses that disagree may lose commercial access to Meta’s products.

Legal experts told Nieman Lab the terms could be used to argue that Meta is authorized to collect news content and train AI without negotiating licenses, potentially even overriding instructions such as robots.txt. Meta says it has not changed how it uses crawlers, that sites can still indicate their preferences through robots.txt, and that the update is intended to obtain accurate information about products on third-party websites for ad and content recommendations, not to scrape news sites.