Meta has backed down in the face of fierce objections from publishers and businesses. The company has rewritten a controversial section of its commercial terms, which were set to take effect at the end of the month.

All references pointing to artificial intelligence model training have been removed from the new text. Even so, the ambiguities surrounding the crawling of commercial account holders' websites have not been fully resolved.

What did the original text say?

As first highlighted by Nieman Lab, the original draft had Meta claiming the right to crawl, index and cache domains, web pages and URLs linked to business accounts using bots, automated tools and web scrapers. The collected content, it said, could be used to "research, develop and train" the company's products.

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The provision, due to come into force on October 30, caused significant alarm among publishers and businesses running corporate accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Meta then quietly revised the terms: the word "train" was removed, and the scraping of data was said to serve only the purpose of "serving, developing, researching and maintaining" advertising and business products. Company spokesperson Andy Stone said the new terms are limited in scope to advertising and business products, and that there is no direct provision covering the crawling of news sites.

The industry isn't convinced

The softened language has not ended the unease. Lawyers and industry representatives stress that the crawling rights granted to Meta remain far too broad, despite the revision. While the company says it will respect content owners' robots.txt preferences, that protocol carries no legal weight — and AI firms are known to routinely bypass such restrictions.

Relations between Meta and the media were already strained: the company stopped paying for news content in 2022 and removed its dedicated news tab in 2024. News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey described the rules as "unacceptable and likely illegal," while Theo Bamber, CEO of the UK's News Media Association, called the move "an audacious land grab."