Meta removes wording from business terms that raised scraping and AI training concerns

Meta recently updated its business terms, which had stated the company could "use any content on the domain, webpage, or URL of a business account to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain" Meta products and services. Legal experts told Nieman Lab this looked like a "striking clause" that could give Meta a license to scrape any publisher site with a Meta business account and train its AI models on the content. A Meta spokesperson said the terms update did not represent a change in how it scrapes the web. According to The Verge, the clause has now been removed. Meta said in a statement: "We heard your feedback and want to clarify: the scraping terms we consolidated apply only to ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves. This does not change how Meta uses web crawlers." This directly affects publishers and technical teams running websites connected to Meta ad or business products: they previously had to assess whether their site content might be used for model training. With the clause removed, that specific authorization interpretation no longer exists, though Meta says scraping behavior itself is unchanged.