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Publishers Face Web-Crawling Without Opt-Out
19 Oct
Summary
- Meta's new terms permit web crawlers to access publication sites.
- The updated policy takes effect on October 30, with no opt-out option.
- Meta states this is a consolidation of existing advertising terms.
Beginning October 30, Meta's updated commercial terms will authorize its automated software, including web scrapers and bots, to crawl websites associated with Meta business accounts. This policy change affects users of Meta Business Suite, the platform for managing Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp channels. There will be no opt-out available for publishers, meaning they must agree to the web-scraping or risk removal from the platform.
Meta asserts that these changes are a consolidation of existing commercial and self-serve ad terms, intended to simplify understanding of advertising rules. A company spokesperson stated that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers and that content owners can still use robots.txt flags to communicate preferences. This development occurs amid ongoing copyright lawsuits by publishers against AI companies for utilizing content for model training and search queries without attribution.
