Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites: experts
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Meta's new commercial terms let it scrape news sites tied to business accounts for AI training.
Meta's updated commercial terms, effective October 30, allow the company to use web scrapers to crawl content from websites associated with business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Legal experts say news publishers with business accounts effectively grant Meta permission to train AI on their sites' content, potentially bypassing paywalls via test credentials. There is no opt-out; publishers must stop using business accounts to avoid the terms. Meta claims the language consolidates existing crawling policies and that robots.txt still works, but experts argue the new terms could override blocking instructions.
What commenters are saying
Commenters are sharply critical, calling the move an arrogant power grab enabled by legal engineering. Several note that businesses have few alternatives, as Meta holds an effective monopoly on social advertising. A minority argue that scraping public websites does not require consent, and that businesses can simply close their accounts. One commenter highlights the irony that Meta now charges for link posts while crawling the same content for free. The thread splits between those seeing a clear antitrust abuse and those viewing it as an unremarkable contract update between businesses.