Meta's new commercial terms are reportedly allowing free scraping of publisher content for AI training.

According to Nieman Lab, Meta's new commercial terms, effective October 30, authorize its use of crawlers to scrape website content linked to business accounts for developing and training AI products. Legal experts suggest this could allow Meta to bypass robots.txt directives and authorization agreements; a Meta spokesperson denied that crawler usage has changed, stating publishers can still express preferences via robots.txt. Companies disagreeing with the new terms must stop using Meta products for commercial purposes.