Meta drops a terms clause critics read as a licence to scrape

The deleted passage claimed the right to use any content on the domains and web pages linked to a business account to build and train Meta’s products. Any publisher holding a Meta business account could have had its articles fed into Meta’s AI, legal experts told Nieman Lab, TechCrunch notes. Some read it as overriding robots.txt, the file a site uses to tell crawlers which pages to leave alone.

Meta says its crawlers work as they did before. The removed terms were meant for its ads and business tools alone, a spokesperson told The Verge, and robots.txt still governs what its crawlers read.

If your brand advertises on Facebook or Instagram, your linked website now sits under narrower terms than the version that drew the backlash.