Archived version

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

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The new terms broadly cover business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the platform’s business account dashboard. As written, the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products, according to three legal experts who reviewed the terms at Nieman Lab’s request.

“This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”

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