Meta removed wording from its commercial terms that had raised concerns about data scraping and AI training.

What it means

Meta has removed a passage from its commercial terms — the agreement governing business users of its platforms — that legal experts read as giving it broad rights to scrape or reuse content from businesses' domains, web pages, and apps, including news publishers' sites, for AI training. The deletion follows public criticism; Meta says the edit was only a clarification and that its web-crawling practices have not changed.

Accuracy & sourcesGrounded

The claim is based on Meta's updated commercial terms and a Meta spokesperson's statement, reported closely by TechCrunch and The Verge, so the fact of the removal is solidly reported. Meta's insistence that the change reflects no behavioral shift is a company assertion, not independently established.

How new

Newly reported on October 17, 2026, as a direct response to expert and publisher concerns about the clause; it is not a resurfaced story.

Past coverage