Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

Meta removed the word "train" from its streamlined commercial terms of service, which take effect October 30, after legal experts warned the terms could let Meta scrape websites linked on business pages and avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the company did not alert users to the changed language and said the crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products," adding that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal preferences. Attorney Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy told Nieman Lab the revisions do not go far enough and that "publishers should remain concerned.

Hoping to quell criticism, Meta has dropped the word “train” from its “streamlined” commercial terms of service https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/meta-may-use-sweeping-new-commercial-tos-to-avoid-millions-in-ai-licensing-fees/ that kick in on October 30. Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/ that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy roll-out. In response to backlash, Meta’s spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab’s initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts’ concerns: “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. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.” The same experts who sounded the initial alarms were not impressed by Meta’s updates, which they told Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/legal-experts-warn-metas-new-terms-still-grant-broad-scraping-permissions-despite-language-changes/ do not go far enough to protect business page users from invasive scraping. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “publishers should remain concerned.”