Meta recently revised its commercial terms of use, initially including language that allowed the company to use content from business accounts’ websites to develop and train its products and services. This provision raised concerns among legal experts who viewed it as granting Meta broad permission to scrape publisher websites linked to Meta business accounts for AI training purposes. Despite Meta winning a significant copyright lawsuit last year, ongoing legal challenges against AI companies, including Meta, have kept scrutiny on such practices.
Following public and media attention, Meta clarified that the updated terms did not represent a change in how it crawls the web. Subsequently, The Verge reported that Meta removed the contentious clause from its terms.
In a statement, Meta said, "We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers."
This adjustment signals Meta’s effort to address concerns about data usage and transparency in AI training, especially as regulatory and legal pressures around content scraping and copyright continue to evolve.