In Brief Posted: 2:31 PM PDT · October 17, 2026 Image Credits: picture alliance / Contributor (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Meta has stripped a provision from its commercial terms that had alarmed legal observers and publishers. The earlier update to the terms said the company 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 quoted by Nieman Lab described the clause as a remarkable provision that could allow Meta to scrape any publisher’s site linked to a Meta business account and employ the material for training its AI models. Although Meta won a high‑profile copyright lawsuit last year, other actions against AI firms, including Meta, remain pending.
A Meta spokesperson clarified that the revised language did not alter the way Meta crawls the web. The Verge now reports that the contentious clause has been removed. “We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” the company said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”