New terms let Meta crawl sites tied to business users and use the content to train its products, widening rights ad buyers had already granted.

Meta’s updated Commercial Terms, which take effect Oct. 30, give the company permission to crawl websites associated with businesses that use its products and to use that content to train those products. The terms apply to any business use of Meta’s products, from running ads to managing a Facebook Page.

Nieman Lab reported this development on Oct. 15. A total of three law professionals have viewed the terms for this media outlet and believe that language in these terms could support an argument by Meta that it is permitted to scrape websites of news sites and use the scraped content to train its AI products.

On Oct. 16, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded on X to a post summarizing that report and called the summary false. He wrote that the update is meant to make sure Meta can pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when it makes ad and content recommendations on its platforms, and that it’s “not about scraping news sites.”

Meta’s ad terms already let it crawl advertisers’ websites for uses that include training. The October version reaches businesses that don’t buy ads.

The new crawling paragraph in the Commercial Terms lets Meta, or anyone acting for it, use web scrapers, bots and other automated tools to crawl and collect content from domains and pages associated with a business’s products or services.

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