Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say

Meta removed the word "train" from business terms that take effect October 30th, but legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised language still lets Meta use scraped news-site content to "develop" any "business product," which Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann said "does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites." Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge the update "is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences," adding that content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. The change followed backlash from the publishing industry, including the News Media Alliance, over the original terms.

Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge — but legal experts say these changes aren’t enough to address their concerns. “This does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ language that would let Meta scrape entire sites,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/legal-experts-warn-metas-new-terms-still-grant-broad-scraping-permissions-despite-language-changes/ . Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say Meta’s new business terms could still help it justify training AI on scraped sites. Initially, Meta’s new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI https://www.theverge.com/tech/1012846/meta-business-terms-scrape-news-publishers on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta “may use any content” from the websites associated with a business account to “develop, research” and “train” Meta’s products. At the time, legal experts told Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/ that this could allow Meta “to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” such as the robots.txt file https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders that has historically told scrapers including search engines like Google what they are allowed to crawl. Following fierce backlash https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/changes-to-meta-commercial-terms-of-use/ from the publishing industry, Meta removed language saying it would “train” its products with scraped content. But the tweaks might not be enough to rule out that possibility. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train,’” Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, tells Nieman Lab. Meta has maintained that its new terms aren’t designed to scrape news content for free. In a statement to The Verge today, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts reiterated that “content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences,” adding that the update “is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.” Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.