Meta Removes Scraping Clause From Commercial Terms After Backlash

Meta deleted a clause from its commercial terms page on October 17, 2026, at 3:04 p.m. UTC, erasing language that critics said let the company train AI on scraped content from news sites, The Verge reported. The move marks the second time this year Meta has revised the disputed terms after publishers and legal scholars objected.

What exactly did Meta delete?

The removed passage read: "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," according to the version of the commercial terms page cited by The Verge. That sentence no longer appears on the page as of the October 17 update.

Why did the original clause draw objections?

Nieman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, both read the clause as an attempt to secure free rights to scraped site content for AI training and to override blocking instructions set in a site's robots.txt file — the standard text file publishers use to tell automated crawlers which pages they may not access. Grimmelmann's reading, cited by The Verge, treated the language as a potential end-run around that opt-out mechanism, which is the primary tool news outlets have used to signal they do not want their pages harvested for model training.

How has Meta responded to the criticism?

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, and spokesperson Daniel Roberts disputed that interpretation before the terms were changed. "There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false," Stone said, per The Verge. Despite that denial, Meta's October 17 update removed the contested sentence entirely rather than leaving it in place with a clarifying statement.

What does the terms-page history show?

• 1 sentence removed: the specific AI-training clause cited by Nieman Lab and Grimmelmann no longer appears on Meta's commercial terms page.
• 2 rounds of edits: Meta's statement and the October 17 change follow an earlier revision to the same terms, after the first round of publisher backlash, per The Verge's account.
• 3:04 p.m. UTC: the timestamp The Verge recorded for the October 17 story documenting the change.

What should publishers and site operators watch next?

• Whether Meta issues any further clarifying language about how robots.txt directives interact with its crawlers.
• Whether Nieman Lab, Grimmelmann, or other legal scholars publish updated analysis now that the clause is gone.
• Whether other AI developers with similar commercial-terms language face comparable scrutiny from publishers.
• Whether Meta's public denial — that crawler behavior is unchanged — is tested against the removed contract text in any future dispute.

The removal does not, on its own, confirm or resolve the underlying question Nieman Lab and Grimmelmann raised: whether Meta's crawlers have, in practice, ignored robots.txt instructions on any site. Meta's position, voiced by Stone, is that nothing about crawler behavior changed; the terms page itself is the only thing that moved.