After weeks of widespread criticism and an unsuccessful attempt to mitigate it, Meta has indefinitely postponed plans to update its commercial terms. The policy change would have required Meta Business account users to permit extensive artificial intelligence training on external websites linked via 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.
Legal Concerns and Scraping Rules
Shortly after Meta informed business account holders about the pending updates, legal professionals cautioned Nieman Lab that the ambiguous wording could permit the tech giant to disregard scraping preferences outlined in robots.txt files. This would have enabled the company to exhaustively crawl massive quantities of content located off Facebook for AI training purposes. Because nearly all news publishers maintain a Facebook page, Nieman Lab warned that Meta might circumvent millions of dollars in licensing fees if the terms of service update proceeded as scheduled.
Ars Technica analyzed the modifications following Meta’s announcement, observing that enterprises—such as news publishers currently engaged in prolonged legal disputes concerning unauthorized AI scraping—lacked any mechanism to opt out. Maintaining a business Facebook page necessitated granting Meta permission to crawl all associated external websites. Furthermore, the provisions mandated that publishers establish test credentials to ensure Meta’s bots could consistently bypass paywalls.
Global Scrutiny and Investigation
The policy modifications were originally scheduled to take effect on October 30. However, Meta postponed the implementation date to November 20 following resistance from Facebook users, judicial systems, and regulatory bodies internationally. Courts situated in Brazil and Norway enacted preliminary injunctions halting the terms after local organizations swiftly initiated legal proceedings, as reported by Nieman Lab.
Additionally, the Competition and Markets Authority in the United Kingdom initiated a formal inquiry to determine whether Meta was leveraging a dominant market position to acquire valuable AI training data. Writing on LinkedIn, Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK’s News Media Association, described “the continued arrogance of this company to think everyone will just be OK with its actions” as “staggering.”
