Meta's New Business Terms Permit Web Scraping, Legal Experts Warn of AI Licensing Fallout

The terms apply to accounts that use Meta Business Suite's account dashboard, through which companies manage Instagram profiles, Facebook pages, Messenger and WhatsApp channels, ZDNet reported. Under the new language, users authorize Meta or entities acting on its behalf to use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl domains, web pages or URLs associated with their products or services, and to periodically pull updates. Meta may use any content from those domains to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta products, services and features, according to the terms.

The changes take effect Oct. 30 and offer no opt-out, ZDNet reported, meaning publishers and businesses that use Meta Business Suite must agree to the web-scraping language or leave the platform. The terms affect all business accounts but are particularly consequential for news publishers, which could otherwise charge Meta millions in licensing fees for continued access to articles for AI training, according to Nieman Lab, as reported by Ars Technica and Slashdot. Nieman Lab said virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account.

Meta defended the update, telling The Verge, according to ZDNet, that it is consolidating its commercial and self-serve ad terms. A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab that the company has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites, and that it still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. The spokesperson told Ars Technica there is 'no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.'

Critics focus on the terms' reference to 'train' and to automated scraping and crawling, though the language does not mention AI directly, according to Slashdot. News organizations are already fighting OpenAI over whether training on their content without licensing is fair use. If courts affirm that AI training on non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question whether Meta's position could change and whether the terms could be used to override robots.txt instructions, Slashdot reported.

Publishers including Ziff Davis, ZDNet's parent company, have filed copyright lawsuits against AI companies over the use of their content for model training and for answering search queries without attribution, ZDNet reported. Several AI labs have signed licensing agreements with news publications to avoid such disputes. Journalistic content is considered high-quality training data because it is traditionally fact-checked and edited, unlike personal blogs or other text scraped from the open internet, according to ZDNet.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ZDNet.