What’s changed

It covers business accounts used to manage Facebook pages, Messenger accounts, Instagram profiles, or WhatsApp channels, which in practice includes almost every publisher.

The terms allow Meta to use content from those sites to develop, improve, and train its products and services, and Meta’s definition of its products includes its AI services.

The current commercial terms, dated March 2024, contain no crawling clause. There’s no partial opt-out: rejecting the terms means stopping use of Meta’s commercial products and continuing to use them after the update counts as accepting the new terms.

Lisa Amrani, Associate, Hausfeld commented “Meta’s new terms grant it broader crawling permissions across a wider range of business uses. Although Meta says publishers can control access through robots.txt, the terms do not mention any such choice. Publishers are still left with no other option but to accept terms where consent is the default across the board and bear to burden of preventing scraping.

This raises concerns about gatekeepers offering meaningful control to publishers – similar to the concerns which gave rise to the CMA’s recent publisher conduct requirement obliging Google to give publishers effective controls over the use of their search content in generative AI – and could potentially be an area for consideration in the future.”

Meta’s defence

Meta says the update simply consolidates crawling language previously spread across different terms. They say it won’t change how Meta crawls publishers, who can still manage access through robots.txt.

It has also said the terms apply only to its ads and business products. However, neither the updated commercial terms nor the self-serve ad terms mention robots.txt, and legal experts have warned that the wording could give Meta an opening to argue its terms override other blocking instructions.

How the PPA is responding

We’re consulting members to understand the impact of this on their businesses and will be recommending that the CMA bring forward an SMS investigation into Meta as soon as possible.

Eilidh Wilson, Head of Policy and Public Affairs commented: “The PPA is deeply concerned by this sudden change to Meta’s Terms and Conditions. Whatever assurances Meta has given in recent days about respecting robots.txt preferences, these terms and conditions would contractually trap publishers, leaving them reliant on Meta’s goodwill not to crawl their content. Many publishers depend on Meta for a significant share of their traffic, which they simply cannot afford to lose overnight. They now face an impossible choice: give up a vital source of audience or leave their content open to being used to train Meta’s AI products and services, with no remuneration and no legal route to redress.”

If you have any questions, please contact the PPA’s Head of Policy and Public Affairs: eilidh.wilson@ppa.co.uk