ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The new terms of the Meta Business Suite allow web-crawling on publication sites, legal experts say.
- The change will take effect on October 30.
- Meta says the updated terms are a “consolidation” of pre-existing terms.
Meta’s new commercial terms allow its webscrapers, bots and agents to crawl websites “linked to” Meta’s business accounts, including news publishers, according to a report by Nieman Lab.
The terms apply to accounts using Meta Business Suite’s account dashboard. Companies manage their Instagram profiles, Facebook pages, Messenger and WhatsApp channels through Meta Business Suite. ZDNET uses Meta Business Suite to analyze and schedule posts across social media platforms.
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What changes
The changes will take effect on October 30, and Meta will not provide an opt-out, which means that publishers will either agree to the web scraping or be kicked off the platform. These are Meta’s new terms for web crawling:
You authorize us (or any entity acting on its behalf) to use automated software (such as webscrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test identification information to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, websites or URLs (and any content available with or through your products) users’ use of Meta Company products and services, and for periodic updates of such To pull domains, websites or URLs. Meta may use any content of such domains, websites, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of Meta Company’s products, services, and features provided under these commercial terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
Publishers vs. AI companies
Meta could avoid entering into licensing negotiations with many websites and news publications through this new web-scraping language, Nieman Lab reports. Tech companies need tons of data and information to train their AI models, but not just any data will do. Journalistic content makes for a high-quality dataset because it has traditionally been fact-checked and edited, which personal blogs or other texts scraped from the open internet might not be.
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But partly because of how AI search features have negatively affected traffic to news sites (and therefore ad dollars), publishers (including Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company) have launched copyright lawsuits against AI companies for using their content, both for model training and answering search queries without attribution. Several AI labs have forged licensing agreements with news publications to avoid this.
Meta defended its position in an email to ZDNET, saying it was consolidating its commercial and self-serve ad terms. “There is no change in how Meta Web Crawler is used; any suggestion to the contrary is false. We are simply consolidating our commercial and self-serve ad terms to make it easier for businesses to understand our advertising rules. Content owners can still use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences, as we clearly explain in our developer documentation,” said a company spokesperson.