Why did Meta pause its business terms update?
Meta has indefinitely paused plans to update its commercial terms, a change that would have required Meta Business account users to allow extensive artificial intelligence training on external websites linked from Facebook. The decision comes after weeks of criticism that the company had failed to make the changes palatable to publishers, courts and regulators.
“We’re pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right. In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
The trouble started soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes. Legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the language was vague enough to let the company ignore scraping preferences set in robots.txt files and crawl large amounts of content from outside Facebook for AI training. Because nearly every news publisher operates a Facebook page, Nieman Lab reported that Meta could avoid millions of dollars in licensing fees if the update took effect as planned.
Would Meta's terms let it scrape news sites for AI training?
Ars broke down the terms after the announcement and found that businesses, including news publishers already locked in drawn-out legal fights over unwanted AI scraping, had no way to opt out. To keep a business page, they had to let Meta crawl any external sites linked from it. The terms also required publishers to create test credentials so Meta’s bots could reliably get past paywalls.
The changes were originally scheduled to take effect on October 30. Meta pushed the date back to November 20 after pressure from Facebook users, courts and regulators around the world. Courts in Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions blocking the terms after organizations in those countries filed lawsuits, according to Nieman Lab.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal investigation into whether Meta is exploiting a dominant position to gain valuable AI training data. Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK’s News Media Association, criticized the company in a LinkedIn post. He called “the continued arrogance of this company to think everyone will just be OK with its actions” staggering.
“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Bamber wrote. He said that removing the word “train” from the terms did little to reassure publishers, because the word “develop” posed the same threat.
“It’s saying it can use all the content it scrapes to develop ‘any business product’. I mean, come on,” he wrote.
Concern also reached Washington. Nieman Lab noted bipartisan opposition, with Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sending letters asking Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms.
On October 28, Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, posted on X that the company would do just that, at least for now. “We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update,” Stone said. “We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders.” He added that the consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case Meta would delay implementation.
Does Meta's crawling still respect robots.txt?
Meta has said it would never use its terms of service to get around robots.txt. In a notice to business page owners, the company offered a “reminder” that “our crawling practices remain unchanged, and content owners can continue to signal their crawling preferences using robots.txt.”
Critics have not been satisfied. Nieman Lab noted that Meta took steps to address publishers’ concerns but “has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service.” The pause buys time, but the company has not said when or whether a revised version will return.
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