Meta’s New Commercial Terms Let It Crawl Sites Linked to Business Accounts and Use the Content to “Train” Its Products

Meta’s updated Commercial Terms, which take effect on 30 October 2026, give the company permission to crawl websites associated with business accounts on its platforms and to use that content to “train” Meta products. That is according to Nieman Lab, which reported the change on 15 October and asked three legal experts to review the wording. Business accounts are not limited to news organisations, but Nieman Lab notes that “virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account”. Meta says the update simply consolidates existing language and will not change how it crawls publishers.

What the terms say

Business accounts let companies and public figures run Facebook pages, Messenger accounts, Instagram profiles and WhatsApp channels from one place. According to Nieman Lab, the new terms broadly cover accounts that manage pages and groups, run adverts, send marketing messages or use the Meta Business Suite dashboard.

Nieman Lab published the scraping clause in full. It reads:

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. 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 notes that Meta’s wider terms define “AI at Meta” as one of its products. TSN could not open Meta’s terms page directly, so the wording above is as published by Nieman Lab.

No opt-out short of leaving

According to Nieman Lab, business accounts have no way to opt out of the new terms before 30 October. The only alternative is to stop using Meta’s business products. The update states: “If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.”

What Meta says

Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab’s list of questions. A public affairs spokesperson said by email that language about crawling had previously been scattered across different terms, including Meta’s terms on generative AI in adverts, and that the update gathers it in one place. According to Nieman Lab, he said the new terms will not change how Meta crawls publishers in the future, and that “content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt.” Robots.txt is the file that tells bots which parts of a website they may visit. Nieman Lab notes that Meta publishes instructions for blocking its crawlers this way.

What the legal experts think

The three experts’ readings are their own opinions. No court has tested the clause.

Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property lawyer at Loevy & Loevy, called it “a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.” He added: “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, said: “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.” In his view, publishers “either have to trust that Meta doesn’t mean the full extent of what these terms say, or they have to stop” using business accounts.

The experts also told Nieman Lab that the wording gives Meta an opening to argue that its terms take precedence over other blocking instructions. Grimmelmann said the “test credentials” language could in principle let Meta “sign up as a fake user” to get past registration walls. Meta declined to say whether test credentials would be used to bypass paywalls or other paid content. Whether the terms override robots.txt or allow paywall access is therefore an unresolved question, not an established fact.

Benjamin Sobel, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, compared the arrangement to “tying”, a concept from competition law: “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.”

The experts also said that any AI training on content collected this way would still depend on unsettled questions about AI training and fair use. Several lawsuits between publishers and AI developers are under way in US federal courts. They include a class action filed in May by five large book publishers alleging that Meta pirated millions of books to train its Llama models.

A publisher weighing up leaving

Nieman Lab learned about the change from Stephen Beale, founder of The Steampunk Explorer, who saw the notice in his Meta Business Suite dashboard. “They’re saying that [since you are] a business user of Facebook, they have the right to go out and grab information from basically wherever you have a presence,” he said. Beale said he is seriously considering closing his accounts before 30 October.

What this means

• From 30 October, Meta’s Commercial Terms give it written permission to crawl sites linked to business accounts and to use that content to “train” its products. The only way to refuse is to stop using Meta’s business products.
• Meta says its crawling will not change and that robots.txt still works. The terms do not say how they interact with robots.txt or paywalls, and Meta declined to clarify.
• Legal experts see real risk for publishers, but that is their opinion. Enforceability and fair use remain untested.

Sources

• Nieman Lab: Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say
• Meta: Commercial Terms (preview of update)

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