Meta’s revised commercial terms of use will allow the company to use web scrapers to collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The update, which takes effect on October 30, explicitly covers news publishers that maintain business accounts with Meta.
Legal experts quoted in the report say the language gives Meta broad latitude to crawl and gather material from those sites. The key shift is that publishers who participate in Meta’s business ecosystem may now be treated as having agreed to scraping as part of those commercial terms.
The report does not describe any exemptions for news organizations, nor does it indicate that publishers were consulted before the change. The main takeaway for the Society section is straightforward: a platform many newsrooms rely on for distribution is also positioning itself to mine their websites under the banner of updated terms.