Meta's new Commercial Terms will allow scraping of news sites, legal experts say

What happened

Meta's updated Commercial Terms take effect October 30, 2026. A new paragraph authorizes Meta to use scrapers, bots, and crawlers - and to create "test credentials" - to crawl any domains, web pages, or URLs "associated with" a business user's products or services, and to use "any content" from them to "provide, develop, improve, research, train" Meta products.

Legal experts' reading

Three legal experts told Nieman Lab the terms could be used to argue Meta may scrape news sites and use that content to train Meta's AI products, potentially superseding robots.txt or paywall signals. Matt Topic (Loevy & Loevy), James Grimmelmann (Cornell), and Benjamin Sobel (Wisconsin) were quoted; per the piece, the "test credentials" language could technically let Meta sign up as a fake user to bypass registration walls.

Meta's response

A Meta spokesperson said the update merely consolidates crawling language previously scattered across other terms and will not change crawling practice; he declined to answer whether "test credentials" would be used to bypass paywalls.

Opt-out

Per the reporting, no opt-out exists short of stopping all business or commercial use of Meta products.