Meta's new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites

Meta’s new commercial terms let it use web scrapers to crawl sites associated with business accounts, effective October 30. That includes news publishers that manage Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger accounts.

The terms allow Meta to use collected content to train Meta products and reference “AI at Meta.” Legal experts say this could let Meta bypass paywalls with “test credentials” and argue its terms override robots.txt. There is no opt out before Oct. 30. Meta says the change consolidates prior crawling rules. Publishers face legal uncertainty and some are considering leaving.