Meta has paused a planned update to its commercial terms that legal experts and publishers warned would have let the company scrape external websites linked from business Facebook pages for AI training. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters the company is holding off on the changes while it continues talking with stakeholders and takes time to get the policy right, and that the existing terms remain in effect in the meantime.
The controversy began when Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes. Legal experts told Nieman Lab the vague language could have allowed Meta to disregard robots.txt scraping preferences and crawl large amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Because nearly every news publisher maintains a Facebook page, Nieman Lab warned Meta could have avoided millions in licensing fees if the update took effect as planned.
As Ars reported after Meta announced the changes, businesses, including news publishers already entangled in legal fights over unwanted AI scraping, had no way to opt out. Keeping a business Facebook page would have required allowing Meta to crawl any linked external sites. The terms also would have required publishers to create test credentials so Meta's bots could reliably get past paywalls.
The changes were originally set to take effect on October 30, but Meta moved the date to November 20 amid pushback from Facebook users, courts and regulators worldwide. Courts in Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions blocking the terms after organizations in those countries quickly filed lawsuits, according to Nieman Lab. The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority also opened a formal investigation into whether Meta was abusing a dominant position to capture valuable AI training data.
Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK's News Media Association, said in a LinkedIn post that the company's continued arrogance in assuming everyone would accept its actions was staggering. He objected to the terms' suggestion that Meta could use all the content it scrapes to develop any business product. Nieman Lab also noted bipartisan concern in the US, with Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sending letters asking Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms.
On October 28, Meta vice president of communications Andy Stone posted on X that the company would pull the update, at least for now. Stone said Meta had heard publishers' feedback on the proposed ads and business terms update, cares deeply about its partners and does not plan to make policy changes without full consultation with industry groups and leaders. He said the consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case implementation of the updated terms would be delayed.
Even after promising to withdraw the terms and consult publishers, Meta still drew criticism over the episode.
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