Business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites Starting Oct. 30

Meta’s updated commercial terms, effective October 30, permit the use of web scrapers to collect content from websites associated with business accounts—including news publishers. Legal experts warn this could allow Meta to scrape news content for AI training without compensation. The terms cover pages, groups, ads, and business dashboards, and explicitly authorize crawling, indexing, and using content to train Meta products.

Critics call it a “remarkable provision” buried in fine print, potentially worth millions in licensing fees. Meta claims the language merely consolidates existing policies and that publishers can still use robots.txt to limit access. However, there is no opt-out option, forcing publishers to either accept the terms or stop using business accounts.

Experts urge publishers to assume the terms are enforceable.

Meta的更新商业条款于10月30日生效，允许使用网络爬虫收集与商业账户相关的网站内容——包括新闻出版商。法律专家警告这可能导致Meta无需补偿即可抓取新闻内容用于AI训练。这些条款涵盖页面、群组、广告和商业仪表板，并明确授权爬行、索引和使用内容来训练Meta产品。批评人士称这是一项“引人注目的条款”，隐藏在细则中，潜在的许可费用可能达数百万美元。Meta声称这些条款只是整合了现有的政策，出版商仍然可以使用robots.txt来限制访问。然而，没有选择退出选项，迫使出版商要么接受这些条款，要么停止使用商业账户。专家敦促出版商假设这些条款是可执行的。