After weeks of backlash—and a failed attempt to quell it—Meta has indefinitely delayed plans to update its commercial terms and require Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook.
“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.
Soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes, legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the vague language could allow the company to ignore scraping preferences specified in robots.txt files and exhaustively crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Since virtually every news publisher has a Facebook page, Nieman Lab sounded the alarm that Meta could potentially avoid millions in licensing fees if the TOS update happened as planned.
Ars broke down the changes after Meta announced them, noting that businesses—including news publishers involved in drawn-out legal battles over unwanted AI scraping—had no way to opt out. To keep a business Facebook page, they had to allow Meta to crawl any linked external sites. The terms even required publishers to create test credentials so Meta’s bots could reliably bypass paywalls.
Meta faced global scrutiny #
The changes were initially supposed to take effect on October 30. But Meta pushed that date back to November 20 amid pushback 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 promptly filed lawsuits, Nieman Lab reported.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority also opened a formal investigation into whether Meta was exploiting a dominant position to seize valuable AI training data. In a LinkedIn post, Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK’s News Media Association, pointed to “the continued arrogance of this company to think everyone will just be OK with its actions” as “staggering.”