Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training

Businesses using Facebook commercially may want to think twice about what information they share online.

At the end of the month, Meta plans to introduce terms that would authorize it to collect content from websites associated with its business customers and use it to train AI models or otherwise improve its products.

The ad biz has revised its commercial terms of service, and the new contractual language takes effect on October 30, 2026.

There are at least a million businesses using the company's AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger, to say nothing of other services like Instagram, Facebook, its widely used advertising service, or its less widely used business suite.

As noted by Nieman Lab, almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account.

Meta defines business customers as those "using ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, creating or using a product catalog, managing a Page, managing a Group for business purposes, using any business product, such as Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite." The added language grants Meta the right to use automated software with created credentials to scrape customer content and use it for the enhancement of its products, including AI models.

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users' use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs.

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.

Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, condemned Meta's move.

"Meta’s new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal," she said in a statement.

"The company’s decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power.

It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30." Coffey said any business with intellectual property and a Meta account should question what these terms allow.