This Verge report, by weekend editor Terrence O'Brien, is timestamped 2026-10-17T15:04:36Z, 23:04 in Beijing on 17 October. After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. The commercial terms page no longer shows the sentence the report quotes: Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of the products, services, and features under those commercial terms and any other applicable supplemental terms. That is the deleted sentence as quoted. This draft does not treat it as permission the report has shown is still in force.

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A closed booklet, charcoal cover, muted blue bookmark
A closed booklet lying flat, the cover painted charcoal, the page edges pale, a muted blue bookmark at the left, and a small oxide-red mark inside the pages., AI-generated illustration, not a news photograph

Readers including Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, read the sentence as an attempt to give Meta the right to use scraped content to train its AI products for free, and to supersede blocking instructions in a site’s robots.txt file. That is their reading. The report attaches no court ruling and no regulator’s finding.

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Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts had already answered with this sentence: there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers, and any suggestion to the contrary is false. The Verge writes that today’s terms update and a new statement go further by removing the disputed sentence entirely. In a follow-up to The Verge, Roberts said they had heard the reaction and wanted to clarify: the crawling terms they consolidated applied only to ads and business products, and they have said so in the terms. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. Content owners can still use robots.txt to signal preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and the updates do not give Meta new rights that supersede those preferences.

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The report states no new effective date. This draft does not import a date from another piece. Roberts says the use is unchanged, and that the consolidated crawling terms apply only to ads and business products. The earlier expert reading was a training right, plus an override of robots.txt. Both accounts are in the same report. This draft does not pick one as a verified legal effect. The report gives no crawler list and no procedure. Neither does this draft.

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