A few days ago Meta updated its commercial terms of use and added a sentence that would have let it use content from a business account’s domains, web pages or URLs to “provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products and services. On Friday the passage was gone again.
How the sentence was read
Nieman Lab reported it first and asked legal experts. Their reading: a remarkably broad provision that would have given Meta the right to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train its models. James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell, also understood it as an attempt to supersede the blocking instructions in a site’s robots.txt file, the file a website uses to tell crawlers what to leave alone.
Meta pushed back. Andy Stone, the company’s VP of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts said there was no change to how Meta uses web crawlers and that any suggestion to the contrary was false. That was where it stood: a denial, with the sentence still in the terms.
Removed first, explained after
The Verge reported on Friday that the wording no longer appears on the commercial terms page. Roberts sent a fresh statement with it: the company had heard the complaints and wanted to clarify that the consolidated crawling terms only applied to its ads and business products, and it had now clarified that in the terms themselves. Nothing changes about how Meta uses web crawlers, content owners can signal their preferences through robots.txt as always, this is not about scraping news sites, and the updates give Meta no new rights that override those preferences.
For context: Meta won a high-profile copyright suit last year. Other cases against AI companies, Meta included, are still running.
What the terms say counts for more than the denial
Two things stand out here. A week of attention was enough to pull a paragraph out of a contract nobody normally reads. And the denial had already been issued before that, and it changed nothing.
The practical lesson for anyone running a website with a Meta business account: the intent a spokesperson describes is not the legal position. The legal position is in the terms, and the terms get changed without anyone sending an email. If your content is online, the page worth watching for updates is that one, not the press office.