The U.S. tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram is pausing the implementation of a policy that concerned Canadian news publishers.
Media companies feared the changes to Meta's terms of services would allow websites associated with a business account to be scraped for artificial intelligence purposes.
Meta spokesperson Julia Perreira says in an email that the company is pausing the changes.
She says the will help the company engage with stakeholders and "take the time to get this right."
Several Canadian journalism organizations, whose content Meta has blocked from its platforms in response to the Online News Act, were worried about how their work would be impacted by the once-incoming policy.
European and British publishers has similar concerns and had asked governments and regulators to step in.
Some Canadian news publishers already use robots.txt to block bots from AI companies like OpenAI.
A number of news outlets, including The Canadian Press, have launched lawsuits against OpenAI and Anthropic over the use of copyrighted content for training AI systems.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2026.
The Canadian Press