Slashdot has reported:

Meta is facing criticism over commercial terms taking effect Oct. 30 that could allow it to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use that material to train artificial intelligence. Legal experts warn the update could weaken news publishers’ potential licensing deals, which could be worth millions of dollars, and businesses accepting the terms have no direct opt-out.

The changes apply to all business accounts, including those held by news organizations. Nieman Lab said, “While journalism isn't the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab.”

The terms do not explicitly refer to AI. The concern is inferred from a reference to “train” and language about automated scraping and crawling. News organizations are already disputing with OpenAI whether training AI on their work without a licence qualifies as fair use. The updated Meta terms could grant the company broad permissions regardless of how courts resolve that issue.

Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab the company has no plans to rely on the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news websites. Meta continues to let news organizations opt out of scraping and provides instructions for blocking crawlers. A spokesperson told Ars Technica that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

Publishers remain concerned that the company’s position could change if courts find that AI training on non-news articles is fair use. They question whether the terms could then be used to obtain content despite robots.txt restrictions. Slashdot reported on the issue, citing Ars Technica and Nieman Lab; Nieman Lab reported the matter Thursday.