The Verge reported on 16 October that Meta’s new commercial terms take effect on 30 October. The terms say Meta may use content from websites associated with a business account’s products or services to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products. The policy applies to business accounts that promote content on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

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A closed booklet standing upright, charcoal cover and muted-blue spine
A closed booklet standing upright, its cover painted charcoal and its spine muted blue, with pale paper edges at the top., AI-generated illustration, not a news photograph

Spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the company is consolidating its commercial and self-serve ad terms. His words are that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers, and that any suggestion to the contrary is false. Content owners can still use robots.txt to state preferences, which he says the developer documentation already explains. Andy Stone, vice president of communications, writes on X that the update is meant to pull product information from third-party sites for on-platform ads and recommendations, not to scrape news sites.

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James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, tells Nieman Lab that for news publishers this is permission for Meta to train AI on any content from their sites, and possibly to use some of that content in competition with the publishers. Nieman Lab also writes that Meta has begun charging users to post links, while the same content would be available to crawl for free under the new terms. The Verge attributes that sentence to Nieman Lab.

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Three statements sit side by side. The terms allow associated-site content to be used for training. The company says crawler policy is unchanged and that the change is not aimed at news. A law professor reads it as permission to train on a publisher’s whole site. This story does not pick one of those as a court finding. The terms take effect on 30 October.

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