Meta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free

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The new policy allows Meta to crawl all websites ‘associated’ with a business account.

Meta’s new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites “associated” with the businesses that use its platforms — including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to “develop, improve, research,” and “train” its AI products.

While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says that the company is just “consolidating” its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts tell Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta “to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” like a site’s robots.txt file. That could potentially allow Meta to bypass a licensing agreement and freely train its AI models on content posted by online publishers.