Meta's new terms may allow it to freely crawl news site content to train AI

Meta's new business terms, effective October 30, show that it may crawl and use content from websites associated with platform merchants to develop, improve, research, and train AI products; according to Nieman Lab, this could cover news publishers. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the terms could let Meta argue its business terms take precedence over blocking instructions such as robots.txt, thereby bypassing licensing agreements. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts responded that the company is simply consolidating its business ads and self-serve ads terms, that its use of web crawlers has not changed, and that content owners can still express preferences via robots.txt. Meta's vice president of communications Andy Stone said on X that the update is not aimed at news sites. The terms state that businesses that do not agree to the new policy may lose commercial access to Meta products; last month Meta also launched Meta One, a subscription requiring merchants and creators to pay to include links in posts and reels.