Meta cut “train” out of its new commercial terms, which take effect October 30, after publishers objected that the terms let Meta crawl any website linked to a business page and use what it found to build AI models. The revised terms instead let Meta pull updates from those sites to develop its advertising and business products. A Meta spokesperson said the crawling language only ever covered its ads and business tools, and that site owners can still block its crawlers with robots.txt. Legal experts told Nieman Lab the word “develop” can still cover training, and that Meta could ignore robots.txt because the terms never promise to honor it. Publisher groups in the US, UK and Europe are asking regulators to stop the terms before they take effect.
