Meta has withdrawn a clause from its commercial terms of use that caused an uproar among publishers and legal experts last week. The clause contained language granting Meta the right to “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” its products and services.
As reported by TechCrunch and The Verge, legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab described the wording as a “remarkable provision”: in theory, it could be read as permission for Meta to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account — and use that content to train the company’s AI models. The criticism came shortly after Meta prevailed in a high-profile copyright lawsuit last year, while similar cases against other AI companies continue.
In a statement quoted by The Verge, Meta clarified that the consolidated crawling terms “only applied to our ads and business products” and that the removal “does not change how Meta uses web crawlers”. The company said the terms themselves have now been clarified.
The episode is the latest example of the long tension between giant platforms and publishers: data and content are the fuel of AI, and even a small change of wording in a terms-of-service document can carry enormous economic consequences. For small businesses and site owners — including in Indonesia — it is a reminder to re-read those terms every time a platform announces an “update”.