Meta to Let Scrapers Crawl Business Pages Under New Terms
New Meta Business Suite commercial terms take effect Oct. 30 and allow bots and crawlers to access domains tied to business accounts, with no opt-out.
Meta has updated the commercial terms for Meta Business Suite to allow automated software such as web scrapers, bots and crawlers to access, index and crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with Meta business accounts, according to Nieman Lab. The new terms take effect on Oct. 30.
The company will not offer an opt-out. Publishers that do not agree to the web-scraping terms will be removed from the platform.
Meta described the updated terms as a consolidation of its commercial and self-serve ad terms.
Legal pressure over AI scraping
Publishers including Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, have launched copyright lawsuits against AI companies for using their content for model training and for providing answers to search queries without attribution.
Several AI labs have forged licensing agreements with news publications to avoid such lawsuits.
Quick answers
When do Meta's new Business Suite commercial terms take effect?
The new terms take effect on Oct. 30.
Can publishers opt out of Meta's web-scraping terms?
No. Meta will not offer an opt-out, and publishers that do not agree to the terms will be removed from the platform.
What do Meta's new terms allow?
They allow automated software such as web scrapers, bots and crawlers to access, index and crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with Meta business accounts.