Meta's October 30 Commercial Terms: What They Let Meta Crawl, and Whether Businesses Can Opt Out

Meta's updated commercial terms take effect on October 30, per Meta's terms page. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the new text lets Meta crawl websites "associated with" any business account on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. It can use what it collects to "train" Meta products, a term that includes AI at Meta.

The new text does not say how Meta decides which sites are associated with an account. Consent comes from continued use. A business that keeps using Meta's tools after October 30 has agreed, and Meta's notice tells those who disagree to "stop all access or use" of its products for business purposes. There is no separate opt-out. Lawyers told Nieman Lab the clause reaches nearly every newsroom, since almost all run a Meta business account.

Meta says the change is a consolidation. It said the update gathers existing permissions, will not change how it crawls publishers, and leaves site owners able to manage access through robots.txt, per TechRound. Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy said it is unclear whether a court would enforce it, "but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable." Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann wrote that the terms are "absurdly broad."

The untested question is whether robots.txt still binds Meta once a business has accepted the contract. In the EU, rights holders can reserve content from text and data mining by machine-readable means, and the AI Act requires general-purpose AI providers to respect that. The terms also reportedly let Meta create test credentials to reach pages. Meta would not say whether that extends to paywalls.