Meta has quietly removed a controversial clause from its commercial terms that experts warned could have allowed the company to scrape content from news sites and other domains to train its artificial intelligence models for free. The change, first reported by The Verge, follows weeks of backlash from journalists, legal scholars, and privacy advocates who said the language could override website owners' blocking instructions in robots.txt files.
The specific language no longer appears on Meta's commercial terms page: '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.' The update, combined with a new statement from Meta, marks a full retreat from the provision that triggered the uproar.
What Meta said about the scraping backlash
Meta initially pushed back hard. Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts said at the time that 'There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.' But critics, including Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, interpreted the terms as an attempt to give Meta a free pass to use scraped content for AI training while superseding robots.txt signals.
In a follow-up statement to The Verge this morning, Roberts went further: '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. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences.'
