Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees

Meta will update its commercial terms of service on October 30 to require business accounts to authorize automated scraping and crawling of their linked websites and to let Meta use that content to "train" its products, with no opt-out and no mention of AI, according to Nieman Lab. Legal experts say the change could let Meta avoid paying news publishers millions in AI licensing fees, since virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account. The updated terms state that businesses that do not agree should stop using Meta services.

Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts. Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content. As Nieman Lab reported https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/ Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york-times-might-win-its-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai/ over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. “While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,” the lab said. Specifically, the updated terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/commercial terms preview say: You authorize us or any entity acting on our behalf to use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs and any content available through them that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms. Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling.