Meta TOS: No Opt-Out for AI Scraping by October 30

Meta announced the update in a blog, calling it a "streamlining" of commercial terms. A spokesperson said crawling language was previously scattered across different terms, including those about using generative AI in ads, and this update consolidates them. However, Ars compared the current terms and found the new language is fresh and grants broader provisions than before.

The only previous mention of crawling or bots was in Meta's Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, which allowed scraping only in connection with ad content. The new terms extend that permission to training Meta's products generally. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that this looks like "tying," an antitrust concept where a business forces a buyer to accept a second product as a condition of buying another. They compared it to Google's prior practice of requiring websites to opt in to scraping for AI Overviews if they wanted to be indexed for general search, which Google has since changed to allow opt-outs.

Meta's spokesperson pointed Ars to a Seller Agreement that also mentions test credentials for e-commerce sellers, but that policy is not mentioned in Meta's blog announcing the commercial terms update. At least one Meta user, Stephen Beale, founder of The Steampunk Explorer, is already considering quitting the platform over the update. He told Nieman Lab that the terms seemed like "such an arrogant, in-your-face move" and said, "It just makes me angry, and I don't want them to get away with it."