Meta Deletes AI Training Clause After Backlash

Meta recently updated its business terms of service. The new wording said the company can use any content from business account domains, web pages, or URLs to develop, improve, research, and train its products and services. Legal experts told Nieman Lab this was a striking clause. It could have given Meta the right to scrape websites of publishers with Meta business accounts and use that content to train its AI models. Facing questions, a Meta spokesperson said the update did not change how the company scrapes the web. According to The Verge, the clause has now been removed. Meta clarified that the update was just a consolidation of existing advertising terms. The revised terms now limit crawling and data collection to advertising and commercial products. Site owners can still control crawler access through robots.txt.