Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that experts said allowed the company to scrape news sites for AI training data. The change comes after significant backlash from publishers and legal scholars who interpreted the previous wording as an attempt to bypass standard web crawling restrictions.
Removal of Controversial Terms
The specific clause in question stated that Meta could use content from domains, web pages, or URLs to develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products and services. Many observers, including Neiman Lab and Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann, viewed this as an effort to secure free rights to use scraped content for artificial intelligence models, potentially overriding a website’s robots.txt file.
Robots.txt is a standard protocol that allows website owners to tell search engines and other web crawlers which pages or sections of their site should not be accessed. The removal of the Meta language suggests a shift in how the company handles third-party content rights in its legal agreements.
Company Response and Clarification
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts initially pushed back against the criticism. They stated that there was no change to how Meta uses web crawlers and that suggestions to the contrary were false. They argued that the consolidated terms only applied to ads and business products.
However, in a follow-up statement to The Verge, Roberts clarified the company’s position further. He emphasized that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences. The spokesperson noted that the updates do not grant Meta new rights that supersede those preferences and stated that the changes are not about scraping news sites.
This update marks a retreat from the previous stance. By removing the ambiguous language entirely, Meta aims to address concerns from the publishing industry regarding the use of their content to train large language models. The move reflects ongoing tensions between social media platforms and news organizations over data usage and intellectual property rights.
Source: The Verge
