A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy rollout. In response to backlash, Meta’s spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab’s initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts’ concerns:
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
The same experts who sounded the initial alarms were not impressed by Meta’s updates, which they told Nieman Lab do not go far enough to protect business page users from invasive scraping. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “publishers should remain concerned.”
