Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready... Meta announced Friday that it would impose a delay to its controversial terms of service update — changes which initially would have explicitly allowed the company to mine users’ websites for its own AI.
As Bay Area News Group previously reported last week, the company said told media that it had made “clarifications” regarding its newly updated terms of service for its business and commercial products, which some legal and media experts had previously decried as being too unfair to content creators.
The initial proposed changes had granted Meta sweeping new authority to scrape business users’ websites for content to power its artificial intelligence products without a contract or compensation. The updated policy appears to remove some of the more direct language, though questions remain.
“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to 20 November to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not,” the company said in a statement sent by Emil Vazquez, a company spokesperson.
The new commercial terms had previously been set to take effect on Oct. 30. Other than the date change, the new revised terms remain the same.
Under the new revised terms, Meta says that its “automated software” can grab “any content” in service of “advertising and business products,” among other reasons, including to “maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products.”
Notably, one question is how Meta will use robots.txt — a commonly used set of voluntary instructions that give guidance to a type of automated software known as “web crawlers,” which capture portions of most websites.
Meta also reiterated last week that the new changes do “not change how Meta uses web crawlers.” That could mean publishers can theoretically use their own robots.txt file to block Meta’s crawlers, though the company has not clarified this.
Sam Quigley, the director of communications for the News/Media Alliance, a journalism trade group that had previously slammed Meta’s new move, told Bay Area News Group that it had sent a formal letter to Meta on Thursday.
“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, wrote in the letter.
“Meta’s unilateral conduct, given the scale and reach of its social media platforms, is an exercise of market power and is anticompetitive. Meta’s behavior risks undermining the robust licensing market for publishers’ content and could allow Meta to simply snatch that content for free.”