Meta Removes Disputed Crawling Language From Commercial Terms

TechCrunch reported that the terms had said Meta could “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and services. According to legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab, that looked like a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train its AI models.

The wording mattered because it seemed to reach beyond Meta’s own platforms and into a company’s broader web presence. If you read terms of service for a living, you know how much power can hide inside a supposedly clarifying sentence.

Meta says the clause did not reflect any change in how it crawls the web. In a statement reported by TechCrunch after The Verge noted the provision had been removed, the company said: “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.”

That leaves an awkward but familiar picture. A company adds sweeping language, outside readers interpret it literally, and then the company says the language was misunderstood and rewrites it. The revision does not prove Meta had changed its scraping practices. It does show that the original wording said more than a lot of people were comfortable treating as harmless boilerplate.

TechCrunch also noted that although Meta defeated a high-profile copyright lawsuit last year, other cases against AI companies, including Meta, are still continuing. In that climate, a clause about using content from “domains, web pages, or URLs” was never going to read as routine.