Hoping to quell criticism, Meta has dropped the word “train” from its “streamlined” commercial terms of service that kick in on October 30.
Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy roll-out. In response to backlash, Meta’s spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab’s initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts’ concerns:
“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. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
The same experts who sounded the initial alarms were not impressed by Meta’s updates, which they told Nieman Lab do not go far enough to protect business page users from invasive scraping. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “publishers should remain concerned.”
“The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product,’” Topic said. “That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’”
What do updated terms say?
Initially, Meta’s terms authorized Meta to use “any content” from websites posted on business pages “to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity” of any Meta products, services, or features.
The updated terms delete the word “train” and no longer refer to “any content.” Instead, they allow Meta to “periodically pull updates” from business users’ websites in order to “provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products,” as well as to help Meta “maintain the integrity and security” of its products. This scraping, Meta says, is for users’ benefit, feeding into Meta research into products to “help you create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about your products and services, and connect you with users who may be interested in your products and services,” the policy says.
Following tweaks, it’s good that Meta added “more language about the permitted uses,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab. But “[the] ‘develop…advertising and business products’ [language] is still broad enough to drive a truck through,” he said. Ultimately, Grimmelmann agreed with Topic that “this does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites.”
What would help—as University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel told Nieman Lab—would be if Meta added specific language to the policy where the company agrees to respect scraping instructions in robots.txt files. Since complying with robots.txt is voluntary, Meta could possibly rely on the legally enforceable TOS omitting mentions of robots.txt to scrape sites that attempt to blocking scraping via robots.txt, experts suggested.
When it comes to robots.txt, “you can still express the preference, and unless it’s a legally enforceable preference, it can still be ignored all the same,” Sobel said.
Meta backlash is global
Criticism goes beyond Nieman Lab’s reporting, as news groups globally urge regulators to intervene and block Meta’s controversial terms from kicking in.
A chief executive for the United Kingdom News Media Association, Theo Bamber, accused Meta of a “shameless land grab” relying on the “worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying.” Bamber urged UK regulators to “stand up for British creators and the business community” by “preventing Meta from setting this dreadful precedent.”
Meanwhile, the European Publishers Council has already asked the European Commission to intervene. “Publishers must be able to decide whether and how their journalism is used, and negotiate fair payment,” the group’s executive director, Angela Mills Wad, said. “Burying such far-reaching claims in platform terms is no substitute for consent.”
Similarly, Danielle Coffey, the president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance—which Nieman Lab noted is the largest news publishing trade association in the US— protested the terms as “outrageous and probably illegal.”
In the US, Coffey urged regulators to recognize that Meta’s “decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power.”
“It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30,” Coffey said.
