TL;DR

Meta has announced revised commercial terms that critics say would let it crawl and reuse content from any publisher using Facebook or Instagram, and publishers must choose by 30 October whether to stay. The News Media Association has called the move a “shameless landgrab”, and one campaign group is advising publishers to delete their Meta business accounts before the deadline, Press Gazette reports. Meta says the terms apply only to its ads and business products and do not change how its crawlers work.

What the terms say

As quoted by Press Gazette, the wording authorises Meta to run “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers” against domains linked to a business’s products or services, and to use what it collects to develop and improve Meta products. The original text also listed “train” among those uses. Meta has since deleted that word. Speaking to Nieman Lab, Matt Topic, an American media lawyer, said the amended text still lets Meta use the material to develop any “business product”, adding that “‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’”

The News Media Association’s chief executive, Theo Bamber, asked ministers and regulators to “stand up for British creators” and stop Meta setting what he called a “dreadful precedent”. A legal challenge is being readied by Movement for an Open Web, a campaign group, through the Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission. Its director, James Rosewell, said the damage is “imminent and irreversible” once content goes into a model, and that the group believes the terms reach any company with a Meta account, not just formal business pages.

Meta’s reply

A Meta spokesperson said the consolidated crawling terms “only applied to our ads and business products”. Site owners can still state their preferences through robots.txt, the spokesperson added, and “this is not about scraping news sites”.

Looking forward

For context, Press Gazette cites figures on Meta’s reach, showing 97% of UK internet users are reached by Meta, and Ipsos iris data puts a typical UK user’s time on Meta properties at 79 minutes a day in April 2026. It also comes as eight national newspaper bosses press the Prime Minister to back a bill forcing bots to identify themselves. In our view, Meta’s clarification narrows the dispute but does not settle it: until the CMA or the European Commission responds to the challenge being prepared, publishers must decide by 30 October whether to stay on Meta’s platforms or leave.