Meta Strikes 'Train' From Its New Business Terms Within Two Days of Publishers' Protest -- but Keeps the Right to Crawl Every Linked Website and Create Test Credentials

Meta's consolidated Commercial Terms take effect on October 30, 2026 and apply to anyone using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for business: running ads, managing a Page, selling products or using Meta Business Suite. Nieman Lab reported on October 15 that the new terms contained this sentence: "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."

The "domains, web pages, or URLs" are those "associated with your products or services". Since virtually every news organization has a Meta business account, the clause covered publishers' own sites. The update gave no opt-out: "If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes."

The reaction

Three legal experts reviewed the language for Nieman Lab. "This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market," said Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy. Cornell's James Grimmelmann said that for news publishers it "clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites". On October 16 the News/Media Alliance called the terms "outrageous and probably illegal", and its CEO Danielle Coffey said they "cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30." A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab the update consolidates crawling language that was previously scattered across several terms, and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt."

What the revised text says

A Wayback Machine capture of Meta's preview page from the early hours of October 17 (UTC) shows the training sentence removed. The crawling authorization now ends with a narrower purpose: "to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products (including business, commercial and related 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) and maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products."

Two things did not change. The grant still covers "automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents)", and Meta can still "create test credentials" to reach those pages. Grimmelmann had told Nieman Lab that test credentials would technically let Meta "sign up as a fake user" to get past registration walls. Meta declined to tell Nieman Lab whether they would be used to bypass paywalls.

What remains uncertain. We found no explanation of the edit from Meta, and we could not load the live terms page directly to confirm it matches the capture. "Research" and "develop ... advertising and business products" are still broad. Ad products increasingly include generative tools, so whether crawled content can feed models behind those tools is a question of interpretation, not of the word "train." Legal experts also told Nieman Lab the crawling language creates an opening for Meta to argue that its terms supersede other blocking instructions such as robots.txt.

Analysis: Removing the training clause within about two days shows that contract language now gets the same scrutiny from publishers as crawler behaviour. The underlying deal is unchanged, though: access to Meta's audience in exchange for letting Meta crawl, cache and analyse the business's website on Meta's terms. Publishers with business accounts should keep their own copy of both versions, and check whether their robots.txt rules for Meta's crawlers are actually being honoured before October 30, because the contract no longer settles that question in their favour.