Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites

Meta has removed wording from its commercial terms that appeared to permit it to use material from websites, including news sites, to develop and train its AI. The change follows criticism that the clause could let Meta scrape content without payment and override site owners’ instructions, raising questions about how online publishers’ material may be used.

The deleted clause covered content from specified domains, webpages or URLs and listed uses including research, AI training and product development. Meta representatives said the terms applied only to advertising and business products, did not change its web crawling practices and did not supersede site owners’ preferences; they said websites can continue to signal those preferences through robots.txt.