An upcoming update to Meta’s Terms of Service allows Meta “or any entity acting on our behalf” to remove the websites of any company using a Meta service for commercial purposes.
Meta already crawls the web on a titanic scale, so the expanded terms appear to be a move to strengthen the company’s legal footing as it stakes its future on web browsing agents like its Muse AI agent. The general terms could allow Meta to index commercial sites for Muse to browse or for its advertising activities, or train Muse on how actual commercial operations are organized at the same time that Meta presents Muse as a multi-purpose commercial agent.
According to Ars Technica, the move could allow Meta to avoid several million dollars in content licensing fees, while Nieman Lab reported that the new terms could potentially allow news organizations to access Meta audiences on platforms like Facebook on the contractual condition that they let Meta scrape their websites and use the content.
The update will roll out on October 30 and will cover any website “associated” with one of a commercial user’s products or services (another sweeping claim). Meta defines business users as accounts that advertise, market, sell, or list products, develop applications, create or use product catalogs, manage a business page or group, or use any business product, such as Meta Business Suite, which allows businesses to manage all of their accounts from a single console. One can imagine that this would give Meta scraping rights to an impressive portion of the open web.
The new article reads:
You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and to create test credentials to access, index, cache, crawl, collect, scrape, or crawl 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 the products and services from Meta Company, and to periodically pull updates from these domains, web pages or URLs. Meta may use any content on such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta’s products, services and functionality provided under these Terms of Business and any other applicable Additional Terms.
“This is a remarkable provision to bury in (the) terms of service, given that it would give Meta access to material that would likely cost several million dollars in a licensing market,” Loevy & Loevy intellectual property and media attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab. “It is unclear whether a court would enforce this measure, but publishers should assume it would be enforceable.”
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that the update “clearly represents permission for Meta to train AI on any content on their sites and potentially deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves.” The broadest interpretation, he said, would allow Meta to systematically extract and archive news articles and serve them to users as content as the company desires. Grimmelmann also argued that wording “test credentials” would allow Meta to register on sites to access gated content. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this could extend to content behind paywalls.
Meta also recently implemented Meta One, a paid subscription service that is really more of a way for Meta to charge some Facebook and Instagram users money to get around the new external link limits. Nieman Lab argued: “In other words, Meta has started charging users to post links to the same content that they will be allowed to explore for free. » Meta has granted some publishers an exemption from the program, at least for now.
Notably, Meta refused to answer Nieman Lab’s questions about Meta One or circumventing paywalls. According to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said the “test credentials” language was previously in its seller agreement, but Ars emphasized that the policy seemed narrowly tailored to seller-provided URLs submitted specifically to optimize their listings.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on He added that the update is “ensure that we are able to obtain accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when we make advertising and content recommendations on the platform, and not when scraping news sites.
However, Search Engine Journal noted that Meta’s terms already allowed scraping of advertiser sites, including for training purposes. It’s just the October update that “reaches businesses that don’t buy advertising,” the site writes.
“Meta’s new business terms are outrageous and likely illegal,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News/Media Alliance, wrote in a statement.
“When I talk to my students about how to change (the terms of service), I say you have to give users a real option to reject the terms,” said Eric Goldman, associate dean for research and professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Otherwise it’s just Hobson’s pick or Morton’s fork.”
Goldman added that there are questions about whether this extension to existing business relationships is enforceable, and even if Meta can act in good faith, “Meta has no reservoir of good faith within the community that it can draw on.” Giving Meta the benefit of the doubt is something he “simply can’t do anymore…” Goldman said.
Gn bussni
