“By switching these AI features on by default and shifting 100% of the legal liability onto the advertiser, Meta creates huge operational risks,” said Kayla Loecker, director of operations, programmatic at AdCellerant. “That’s why we systematically turn off Meta’s default AI automation across every campaign—we ensure ads hit the exact target audience and geo requested without unwanted AI modifications, waste, or legal liability.”
Meta did not respond to multiple specific questions regarding advertisers’ experiences with its AI features.
Meta’s new terms also give the social media giant more reach into advertisers’ own websites. Businesses authorize Meta to send “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents” to sites associated with their products and services, and use what Meta collects to “ provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products.”
“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,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “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.”
