Meta's New Business Terms Can Crawl Your Website. From 20 November.

On the 22nd of October, a group representing newspapers across the United States and Canada wrote to Mark Zuckerberg. They asked him to withdraw one clause.

The clause is in Meta's Commercial Terms — the terms you accept to have a business account on Facebook or Instagram. It says Meta may send crawlers to any website associated with your products or services. Not your posts. Your website.

It was due to take effect on the 30th of October. Meta moved the date to the 20th of November. It did not withdraw the clause.

So if you are an independent artist with a Facebook Page, this is about your site, and you have until the 20th of November to read it.

What is actually confirmed

The letter is on the News/Media Alliance's own site, dated the 22nd of October. It asks Meta to withdraw the crawling provision before the terms take effect, and it says publishers would be made to hand over their journalism “under duress and without compensation.”

The clause sits in Section 1 of the Commercial Terms. PPC Land, reporting on the same day, quotes it in pieces. Meta may use “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents.” It may “create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl” those domains. And it may return “periodically for updates.”

Engadget confirmed the delay on the 24th. A Meta spokesperson said the company was extending the effective date to give it time to explain “what's changing and what's not.”

Why it reaches an independent artist

Everything you post on Facebook or Instagram was already Meta's to use. That is old news, and it is not what the letter is about.

This clause points the other way. It covers domains “associated with your products or services”, and domains made available through your use of Meta's products. That is the link in your bio.

For an independent artist, the domain associated with your products is your own site. Your release pages. Your lyrics. Your tour dates. Your store. The artwork sitting on it at full resolution.

There is no opt-out written into the clause. You accept the terms, or you close the account your audience reaches you through.

Two things changed after the backlash

First, the word “train” came out. PPC Land reports that the earlier text listed AI training among the permitted uses; the revised text says Meta will use the content to “develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products.” Read that back and ask what it rules out.

Second, Meta pointed at robots.txt — the small file on a website that asks crawlers to stay away. On the 27th of October the Copyright Alliance said the terms let Meta “ignore or circumvent protocols like robots.txt used to indicate a request to disallow scraping.” Its chief executive, Keith Kupferschmid, called the terms “unconscionable.”

A robots file is a request. It has never been a lock.

The honest part

I have not read Meta's final text myself. Their business terms page will not load for me, so everything above comes from four places, all named and all linked at the bottom: the News/Media Alliance's letter, PPC Land's reading of Section 1, Engadget on the delay, and the Copyright Alliance's statement.

Meta's position is that it is explaining what changes and what does not. The Copyright Alliance's position is that the revisions do not fix it. Those are two positions. Neither one is a finding.

This has been reported as a news-publisher story, and nobody in music has made much noise about it. That is exactly why it is worth your ten minutes. Meta has already moved this date once and can move it again, which is a reason to read it now rather than a reason to wait.

Three things to do

1. Before the 20th of November, open Meta's business Terms of Service and search Section 1 for the word “crawl”. Read the sentence yourself. Do not take my summary, or a headline, as the thing you agreed to.
2. Put a robots.txt file on your own site naming the crawlers you refuse. It is a request and it is weak, and Meta is the one pointing at it, so have one.
3. Decide what lives behind a Meta surface and what does not. If the only route to your next release is a link in an Instagram bio, your reach is on loan.

Where droplr fits

I built droplr.fm on my own, for that reason: a release page on a domain I control, a pre-save that collects an email address instead of a follow, and a download gate that asks for the address directly.

And the honest bit, since this whole piece is about reading the fine print: my links do not survive droplr disappearing either. Nothing I run makes you independent of Meta. It just means the list of people who want your music is yours.