META BACKLASH: Removes 'Train' From AI Terms After Public Pressure...

Meta removed the word "train" from its commercial terms of service before the policy takes effect October 30, but legal experts say the change is cosmetic—the revised language still lets the company scrape business pages and use that content to develop AI products under vaguer terms like "develop" and "improve." The shift came after backlash from scholars and attorneys who warned Meta could avoid paying news organizations licensing fees by harvesting data from business users. Meta's statement insists the policy doesn't give it new scraping rights and that content owners can use robots.txt to opt out, but critics argue the language remains too broad to meaningfully restrict how Meta uses the scraped material.