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Meta's new terms and the news: what changed in v1.4.0
From v1.3.0 (2026-10-27, db67c5ce1) to v1.4.0 (2026-10-27, 871ea4c75), paragraph by paragraph.
0 paragraphs added, 0 removed, 3 changed in place, 68 unchanged. About 30 words added and 0 removed. Insertions are marked like this, deletions like this; unchanged runs are folded to one line; figures appear as their file names.
25 unchanged paragraphs, under In short {#in-short}, What Tami Hoffman is pointing at {#post}, The clause, part by part {#clause}
There is a fair reading of part of this. An ad platform checks the pages its ads link to, for safety and for quality, and that needs a crawler. Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone said on X that the update was "not about scraping news sites", and a later Meta statement said the crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products", that this "is not about scraping news sites",products" and that robots.txt preferences still count.count (reports differ on which spokesperson gave it). The problem is that none of those limits is in the text. "Business products" is not defined: the examples that follow it are illustrative, not limiting, and, as WAN-IFRA put it, Meta's robots.txt assurances are not in the terms.
4 unchanged paragraphs, under Since mid-October {#timeline}
• 16 to 17 October: Meta removed "train""train", and addedits spokespeople said the periodicupdate pullingwas ofnot updates.about Andyscraping Stone'snews statement followed.sites.
36 unchanged paragraphs, under What publishers are asking for {#asks}, My view: do not only write letters {#view}, How a crawler can behave {#crawler}…
1. Our own crawler's numbers were wrong. The licence tiers are set per publisher, and the source watch's export of 27 October gives 74 at A, 933 at B and 16 at C, of about 1,365 pages; the counts and the date we had matched no record.
2. WAN-IFRA's letter is dated 22 October, not 23 October; it was reported the next day.
3. The News Media Association's "pause not a solution" was on 23 October, not 26 October.
4. Andy Stone'sMeta's words** are that the crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products"; we had paraphrased them inside quotation marks. (Reports differ on which spokesperson said it, so we now attribute it to Meta.)
5. "Four of the five demands" was overstated. Meta's public statements match two: robots.txt, and leaving news sites alone.
6. "Five weeks" was wrong for something that started in mid-October. The dispute is eleven days old; the terms take effect five weeks after it started.
7. "Business products" has examples after it. The point is that they are illustrative, not limiting.
8. Cloudflare's pay per crawl was announced as a private beta, not launched, in July 2025.
9. "Most businesses accept without reading" was an absolute without a count; now "often".
3 unchanged paragraphs, under Where this comes from {#sources}