Meta pulls scraping clause from business terms after Nieman Lab scrutiny

The episode began with a routine-sounding update to Meta's commercial terms of use. The language said Meta could use any content from a business account's domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of Meta products and services. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab described that as a remarkable provision that could give Meta permission to scrape the site of any publisher holding a Meta business account and use the content to train its AI models — a reading that landed against the backdrop of continuing copyright cases against AI companies, including Meta, even after Meta defeated a high-profile infringement suit last year. Meta pushed back on that reading at the time, with a spokesperson saying the updated terms did not reflect a change in how the company crawls the web. The Verge now reports the provision has been removed, and Meta's statement frames the fix as clarification: the consolidated crawling terms only applied to its ads and business products, and the company has now said so in the terms themselves, adding that it does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. The sequence suggests the wording, rather than the crawling practice, was what drew scrutiny — a distinction publishers reading the terms may find worth tracking.