A forthcoming update to Meta’s terms of service allows Meta “or any entity acting on our behalf” to scrape the websites of any business using a Meta service for commercial purposes.
Meta already scrapes the web on a titanic scale, so the expanded terms seem like a maneuver to shore up the company’s legal footing as it stakes its future on web-browsing agents like its Muse AI agent. The broad terms could allow Meta to index business sites for Muse to navigate or for its advertising business, or train Muse on how real commercial operations are laid out at the same time Meta is pitching Muse as an all-purpose business agent.
According to Ars Technica, the move could allow Meta to dodge many millions of dollars in content-licensing fees, while Nieman Lab reported the new terms potentially gate news organizations’ access to Meta audiences on platforms like Facebook on the contractual condition they let Meta scrape their websites and use the content.
The update rolls out Oct. 30 and covers any website “associated with” any of a commercial user’s products or services (another sweeping claim). Meta defines commercial users as accounts that advertise, market, sell or list products, develop apps, create or use product catalogs, manage a Page or business Group, or use any business product, such as the Meta Business Suite, which lets companies manage all of their accounts from one console. One can imagine this would give Meta scraping rights to an impressive swathe of the open web.
The new clause 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.
“This is 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,” Loevy & Loevy media and intellectual property attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”
Cornell Law School professor of digital and information law James Grimmelmann told Nieman Lab the update “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.” The broadest interpretation, he said, would allow Meta to systematically pull and archive news articles and serve them to users as content however the company wishes. Grimmelmann also argued the “test credentials” phrasing would allow Meta to register for sites to gain access to gated content. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that could extend to content behind paywalls.
Meta also recently implemented Meta One, a paid subscription service that’s really more of a way for Meta to charge some Facebook and Instagram users money to bypass new external link limits. Nieman Lab argued, “Put another way, Meta has begun charging users to post links to the same content that it will be permitted to crawl for free.” Meta has granted some publishers an exemption from the program, at least for now.
Notably, Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab’s questions about Meta One or bypassing paywalls. According to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said that the “test credentials” language previously appeared in its Seller Agreement, but Ars pointed out that policy seemed narrowly tailored to seller-provided URLs submitted specifically to optimize their listings.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X that a Techmeme summary of Nieman Lab’s account was “false,” adding that Meta’s use of web crawlers remains the same and content owners “can use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences.” He added the update is to “make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites.”
However, Search Engine Journal noted that Meta’s terms already allowed for scraping advertiser sites, including for training. It’s just the October update that “reaches businesses that don’t buy ads,” the site wrote.
“Meta’s new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal,” News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote in a statement.
“When I talk to my students about how to amend [terms of service agreements], I say that you have to give users a bona fide option to reject the terms,” Santa Clara University School of Law associate dean for research and professor of law Eric Goldman told The Register. “Otherwise it’s just Hobson’s choice or Morton’s fork.”
Goldman added that there are questions around whether this extension to existing business relations is enforceable, and while Meta may be acting in good faith, “Meta has no reservoir of good faith among the community that it can draw upon.” Giving Meta the benefit of the doubt is something he “just can’t do… anymore,” Goldman said.
