Meta Deletes Business-Terms Wording Criticized as Letting It Scrape News Sites for SI Training, Calling It a Clarification That Changes Nothing About Its Crawlers
Meta on Oct. 17 deleted a controversial passage from an update to its business terms. Nieman Lab had reported on Oct. 15 that the wording appeared to authorize Meta to crawl the websites of businesses using its business accounts and use the content to train SI products, and that once it took effect on Oct. 30 nearly all news publishers would be affected, drawing strong criticism from the legal community. After follow-up reporting by The Verge, TechCrunch and Ars Technica on Oct. 17, Meta removed the passage and clarified that the terms apply only to advertising and business products, do not change how its web crawlers operate, and that publishers can still express their preferences through robots.txt. Meta characterized the change as a cleanup and clarification of the wording rather than a policy reversal — its crawler practices remain as before, and robots.txt signals remain effective.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
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