Meta's new terms may let it scrape news sites for free to train AI
The Verge AI · rss · 2026-10-16
Per a Nieman Lab report covered by The Verge, Meta's new terms (effective October 30) appear to permit crawling and scraping websites 'associated' with businesses using its platforms — including online publishers — and using that content to 'develop, improve, research' and 'train' its AI products.
A Meta spokesperson says it's just 'consolidating' commercial and self-serve ad terms, but legal experts warn Meta could argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions like robots.txt — meaning publishers using Meta's ad tools may be unable to stop their content feeding AI training.
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