Meta’s updated commercial terms, effective 30 October, grant the company permission to crawl and scrape content from websites associated with business accounts on its platforms. These accounts include online publishers who promote material across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The new policy explicitly permits Meta to use this outside content to develop, improve, research, and train its artificial intelligence products without additional licensing fees. This shift appears to allow the technology giant to bypass previous agreements that protected publisher content from being used for machine learning training.
The change matters because it alters the economic relationship between news organisations and social media platforms regarding data usage. Publishers previously relied on licensing deals to control how their articles were used for AI development. By claiming access to content from business accounts, Meta could significantly expand the volume of news data available for its models at no extra cost. This creates a risk that publishers lose revenue streams while their work fuels competing technology. The scope of “associated” websites remains a key variable in determining the full impact of this policy.
