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Meta Removes Commercial Terms Language Experts Said Allowed Scraping of News Sites for AI Training, The Verge Reports

Bot Mutiny | October 18, 2026

Meta removed language from its commercial terms on Saturday, October 17, 2026, that outside legal experts had read as permission to scrape news publishers' websites and use the content to train its AI products, The Verge reported. The change came two days after Nieman Lab, a publication of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, published a report on the terms, which were due to take effect on October 30. Meta says the crawling terms it consolidated applied only to its ads and business products.

What the terms said

According to Nieman Lab, Meta's updated commercial terms told business account holders: "You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users' use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs."

The sentence The Verge identified as the one that was removed read: "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."

Nieman Lab reported that the terms covered business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, send marketing messages or use Meta's business dashboard, and that virtually every news organization has at least one such account. It also reported that Meta's terms of service define "AI at Meta" as one of the company's products, and that there was no way for business accounts to opt out before October 30. The update reads: "If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes."

What legal experts said

Nieman Lab asked three legal experts to review the terms. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, called it "a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service," and said: "It's not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable."

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab: "For news publishers, this clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves." Nieman Lab reported that Grimmelmann said the "test credentials" language would technically allow Meta to "sign up as a fake user" to access content behind a publisher's registration wall. Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab's questions about whether the credentials would bypass paywalls. The Verge reported that many, including Nieman Lab and Grimmelmann, interpreted the language as an attempt to give Meta the right to use scraped content to train its AI products for free and to supersede blocking instructions in a site's robots.txt file.

Benjamin Sobel, a University of Wisconsin law professor, compared the structure to the antitrust concept of tying, telling Nieman Lab: "If you want to use the Meta products that require acceptance of the commercial terms, you have to also acquiesce to the scraping and crawling permissions exacted in those terms." Nieman Lab reported that the experts also said any AI training on such content would still hinge on unsettled fair use questions.

Meta's response

Nieman Lab reported that Meta declined to answer a list of questions. A Meta public affairs spokesperson said in an email that crawling language had previously been scattered across several sets of terms, including terms for generative AI in ads, and that the update consolidated it. He said the terms would not change how Meta crawls publishers and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt."

After the criticism, The Verge reported, Meta vice president of communications Andy Stone and spokesperson Daniel Roberts said: "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." Meta then removed the language. Roberts gave The Verge this statement: "We've heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences."

TechCrunch, which also reported the removal, noted that Meta won a lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement in 2025 and that other cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue.

What is still unclear

The reports reviewed for this article, which include only the portion of The Verge's article not behind its paywall, identify the removed sentence. In the text available, none say whether the earlier authorization to use scrapers and "test credentials" remains in the terms Meta now publishes, or what content, if any, Meta has collected from publisher sites under the language. Meta says the crawling terms applied only to its "ads and business products"; the reports do not say how Meta actually uses content collected for those products. Meta's revised terms are on its commercial terms page.