Facebook tries to grab all news publisher website content for training for free

Facebook’s getting new terms of service for business users! As of 30 October, if you’re a business, then Facebook can scrape your website and use the content for all sorts of things! The previous version of the terms just said you licensed your content so Meta could serve it in your posts or ads on…

Facebook’s getting new terms of service for business users! As of 30 October, if you’re a business, then Facebook can scrape your website and use the content for all sorts of things! The previous version of the terms just said you licensed your content so Meta could serve it in your posts or ads on their websites. But they’ve added a new paragraph — if you have an account that Meta deems is commercial, they can crawl your website and use the content how they like: [Facebook, archive] to access, index, cache, analyse, 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 … in order to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and business products. In the first version of this update, Meta included that they could “train” on your stuff. The news publishers yelled and they took out the word “train”. Meta told the press: [Verge] 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. That’s great! But Meta did not add any of the good stuff in the press statement to the new terms. It’s still a whole new paragraph in the terms that claims new rights for Meta to use your stuff. The journalism trade press asked lawyers about the new terms. They’re pretty sure the updated wording does not bar Meta doing AI training for free, or scraping in general: [Nieman Lab] 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.’ Publishers are not happy at Meta doing a click-wrap rights grab without a licence — remember that AI training on news content is routinely licensed for actual money now — and don’t believe Meta’s changed its intent. The News Media Alliance in the US told Mercury News: [Mercury] They may have taken out training from the listed uses, but with it not being expressly ruled out, it’s still potentially on the table. In the UK, the News Media Association is calling on the government to regulate Meta’s behaviour. [press release] The European Publishers Council is urgently contacting the European Commission: [press release] Meta cannot simply write itself permission to take that work. Publishers must be able to decide whether and how their journalism is used, and negotiate fair payment. Burying such far-reaching claims in platform terms is no substitute for consent. Or for paying publishers. Video — Podcast

Source: Pivot to AI — Published October 20, 2026 at 20:24 UTC — Category: Business