Meta removes controversial scraping language from its commercial terms

Meta has rewritten its commercial terms again. The change removes language that appeared to let the company scrape content from outside websites, including news sites, and use it to train its AI. The rollback followed sharp backlash from publishers and legal observers. For a company that has signed paid AI licensing deals with media outlets, the original wording looked a lot like a way to skip the paywall entirely. What changed in Meta’s terms The deleted passage was broad. It covered content from domains, web pages, or URLs connected to Meta’s commercial services, and it listed a long set of permitted uses. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms. That clause no longer appears on the commercial terms page. The word doing the heavy lifting was “train,” which is what drew attention. The revised Commercial Terms carry an effective date of October 30, 2026. As first written, they authorized a wide range of automated tools to crawl and scrape data from URLs...