Meta delays new business terms after outcry over potential web scraping of news sites
Meta said it was postponing the rollout of new terms for its business accounts after an outcry from media companies and open-web advocates who said the updated rules would allow the tech giant to scrape vast amounts of data and potentially build competing services.
The new rules, originally scheduled to go into effect Oct. 30, authorize Meta to use automated software such as web scrapers and bots to “index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs” associated with a business account.
The terms would have applied to all business clients, regardless of opposition, and without payment for the extracted content. Critics say Meta would have been able to use the content to potentially build products such as AI services that could compete with news publishers.
The new terms only apply to business accounts. Regular users of Meta’s platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, can already have their posts scraped to train AI models as long as they are public.
Opposition to Meta’s new terms is growing across Europe
On Oct. 28, a court in Norway granted a temporary injunction suspending Meta’s new terms at the request of 180 Norwegian media companies, pending a full assessment of their legality.
Their case was supported by the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association (MBL), whose member newspapers account for approximately 97% of Norwegian newspaper circulation.
“We are satisfied that the court has agreed with us that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable,” said Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, MBL chair of the board.
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority said Oct. 30 it was starting its own investigation into the conditions.
“The CMA is concerned that Meta requiring news publishers and other content businesses to accept these terms could amount to an unlawful imposition of unfair trading conditions,” it said Friday.
Meta, however, says the terms don’t change how the company uses web crawlers.
“This update is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites,” wrote Meta spokesman Andy Stone on X on Oct. 16.
His comments came after a report by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, which said that as written, “the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products.” Niemen Lab said it consulted three legal experts who reviewed the terms at its request.
While there do not appear to have been any lawsuits filed in the U.S., the Association of American Publishers called on Meta to drop the new terms.
