Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services^[oh, the humanity!] if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

“While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account^[a k a Stockholm Syndrome after Facebook decided linking out was costing them ad dollars], including Nieman Lab,” the lab said.

Specifically, the updated terms say:

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.

Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling.

Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans^[narrator: They do] to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

However, should courts affirm that AI training on non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta’s stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.