Meta commercial crawling terms

The Verge reported on October 17 that Meta removed a broad content-training sentence from upcoming commercial terms after legal experts raised concerns through Nieman Lab. Meta said the terms applied to ads and business products and did not change its crawler practices or override content owners’ robots.txt preferences.

The reports establish a disputed interpretation and a reported revision, not a judicial determination of rights or an independent finding that a new scraping operation occurred. The original Nieman Lab analysis dated October 15 and the October 17 response describe successive parts of the same terms controversy.