ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Meta Business Suite’s new terms allow web-crawling on publication sites, legal experts say.
- The change goes into effect on Oct. 30.
- Meta says the updated terms are a “consolidation” of pre-existing conditions.
Meta’s new commercial terms allow its web scrapers, bots, and agents to crawl websites “associated with” Meta business accounts, including news publishers, according to a report by Nieman Lab.
The terms apply to accounts that use 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’s changing
The changes go into effect on Oct. 30, and Meta will not provide an opt-out, meaning publishers will either agree to the web-scraping or be booted from the platform. These are Meta’s new terms and conditions for web-crawling:
You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
Publishers vs. AI companies
Meta could be avoiding entering licensing deals 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’s traditionally been fact-checked and edited, which personal blogs or other text scraped from the open internet may not be.
Also: How to check if ChatGPT and other AI tools cite your website
But, in part because of how AI search features have negatively impacted 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 providing answers to 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 that it is consolidating its commercial and self-serve ad terms. “There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false. We’re 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,” a company spokesperson said.
