Meta has removed specific language from its commercial terms that legal experts and industry observers interpreted as granting the company the right to scrape content from news sites to train its super intelligence (SI) systems. The deletion follows significant backlash regarding the scope of Meta's data collection practices.
What Happened
The controversial clause, which no longer appears on Meta's commercial terms page, previously stated that "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." Critics, including the Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, argued that this wording implied Meta could use scraped content for free and potentially override blocking instructions found in a site’s robots.txt file.
In response to the criticism, Meta released a statement clarifying its position. Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesperson, told The Verge that the consolidated crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products," and asserted that the updates did not grant Meta new rights to supersede content owners' preferences. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, and Roberts also stated, "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false."
Why It Matters
This development highlights the ongoing tension between SI companies seeking vast datasets for model training and publishers asserting control over their intellectual property. As SI models become more capable, the legal and ethical boundaries of web scraping for training data remain a critical issue for the industry. Meta's decision to remove the language, despite maintaining that its operational practices haven't changed, signals an attempt to manage public perception and regulatory scrutiny regarding how SI tools are developed.
The Bottom Line
Meta has deleted the specific terms language that suggested broad scraping rights for SI training, following expert criticism that it might ignore robots.txt directives. The company maintains that its actual web crawler behavior remains unchanged and that content owners can still signal preferences via robots.txt.