Meta removed a provision from its commercial terms on 17 October after experts questioned whether the wording allowed broader use of website content for AI training, the Indian Express reported the following day. The debate concerned websites associated with Meta business accounts.
Legal specialists had argued that the language could grant extensive scraping permissions. Meta responded that the consolidated terms concerned advertising and business products and did not introduce new rights overriding content owners’ preferences.
The company also said its web-crawling practices had not changed and that publishers could continue signalling preferences through robots.txt. These are the concerns and company response reported at the time, rather than a court determination about the clause.