Publishers Say Meta's New Business Terms Hand It Their Websites for AI Training Unless They Quit Its Apps

Meta pays CNN, Fox News, USA Today and People Inc. to license their journalism for AI. Starting October 30, critics fear, it may not need to pay the rest. Under new commercial terms, every business that runs a page, an ad or a marketing message on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger agrees to let Meta crawl its linked websites and use what it finds to "train" Meta products.

There is no opt-out short of leaving. Businesses that don't agree "may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes," the terms say. Virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, as do businesses of every kind. At least a million businesses use Meta's AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger alone, according to The Register.

The clause

Meta announced the update in early October as a "streamlining" that would "reduce overlap between our agreements and improve the clarity of the terms." The key passage is anything but a cleanup:

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 ... 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...

The word "AI" never appears. But Meta's own terms define "AI at Meta" as one of its products, which is why lawyers read "train" as covering its models.

The old language was much narrower. Crawling used to show up only in Meta's Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, limited to URLs "for your use in connection with your ads," Ars Technica found. "Test credentials" appear nowhere in the current commercial, product catalog or ad creative terms. Experts warned they could let Meta get past paywalls. Asked about it, Meta pointed to a Seller Agreement for e-commerce sellers that uses similar wording to optimize listings.

Meta says nothing has changed

"There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false," spokesperson Daniel Roberts said. The company told Nieman Lab the crawling language "was previously scattered across different terms of use" and has simply been consolidated, adding that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt." Meta says it has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt on news sites.

Andy Stone, Meta's VP of communications, wrote on X that the update is meant to help Meta "pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites."

The lawyers aren't so sure that matters. Three legal experts who reviewed the terms told Nieman Lab it is unclear a court would enforce them, but they could be used to argue that Meta may scrape news sites and train on the content, and that the terms override blocking instructions like robots.txt.

"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," said James Grimmelmann of Cornell Law School. Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy called it "a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service," given it covers material "that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market."

Experts compared it to the antitrust concept of tying, likening it to Google's past practice of making sites accept AI Overviews scraping to stay in search. Google has since allowed opt-outs.

"Outrageous and probably illegal"

The News/Media Alliance didn't wait for a court. "Meta's new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal," CEO Danielle Coffey said Thursday, calling the move "an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company's market power" that "cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30." She asked whether Taylor Swift's or Shutterstock's websites would be fair game too if they had Meta business accounts.

Smaller publishers feel stuck. Stephen Beale, who runs The Steampunk Explorer and depends on Facebook for traffic, is weighing quitting the platform. "It just makes me angry, and I don't want them to get away with it," he said, calling it "such an arrogant, in-your-face move."

The timing adds an irony. Last month Meta launched Meta One, a subscription that makes businesses and creators pay to include links in posts and reels. As Nieman Lab put it, Meta "has begun charging users to post links to the same content that it will be permitted to crawl for free."

It all lands in the middle of a wider fight. News organizations are suing OpenAI over whether training without a license is fair use, and platforms keep closing doors on crawlers, as when Reddit killed RSS feeds and walled off Old Reddit, blaming AI scraping. Critics fear Meta's terms run the other way, keeping the door open because the business signed it open.

The terms take effect October 30. Whether a judge would ever let a click on Meta Business Suite outweigh a publisher's robots.txt is a question nobody, including Meta, has had to answer yet.

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