Meta's new business terms may allow it to scrape news publisher data for free to train AI
Meta updated business account terms on Oct 16 to allow scraping website content associated with business accounts for AI training.
On October 16, Meta updated its business account terms of service to allow scraping of all website data associated with business accounts for AI training. The terms relate to whether users can opt out before their data is used in AI training, raising concerns among publishers about the value of their content.
The move is part of Meta's open-weight AI strategy. On October 15, Meta and Apple jointly announced MLX framework optimizations for Muse Spark Open on Macs. Muse Spark Open is a multimodal MoE model with 816B total and 42B activated parameters, supporting a 1M token context window, open-sourced on October 15.
The scope of the new terms is unclear — whether it is limited to websites of business account users or extends to all sites accessible through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp business tools — and Meta has not yet provided further clarification.