Meta Removes Language Permitting News Site Scraping

Meta removed a clause from its commercial terms on October 17, 2026, after publishers and legal experts warned it permitted scraping news sites for AI training. The deleted language claimed rights to use content from any URL to develop Meta’s products, potentially overriding robots.txt blocks. Meta initially denied changing crawler behavior but deleted the paragraph hours later, stating the terms only applied to advertising products and did not supersede robots.txt signals.