Meta has indefinitely delayed a planned update to its commercial terms that would have required Facebook business-page owners to allow extensive AI training on any external website linked from their page. "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 said.
The terms, as originally written, gave business account holders no way to opt out: to keep a Facebook business page, owners had to let Meta crawl any site they linked to, and some publishers say the language would have required them to create test credentials so Meta's bots could bypass paywalls. Legal experts warned the vague wording could let Meta ignore scraping preferences set in sites' robots.txt files — a particular risk given that nearly every news publisher maintains a Facebook page.
Courts and regulators piled on
The changes were originally set to take effect Oct. 30 but were pushed back to Nov. 20 after backlash from users, courts and regulators. Courts in Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions blocking the terms after local organizations sued, and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation into whether Meta was using a dominant market position to seize valuable AI training data.
Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK's News Media Association, called the move "the continued arrogance of this company to think everyone will just be OK with its actions" in a LinkedIn post. "Does Meta think we can't read?" he wrote, arguing that Meta's decision to drop the word "train" from the terms changed little, since the replacement language — allowing use of scraped content to "develop" any business product — "posed the same threat."
In the US, Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent letters to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw the terms. Meta's vice president of communications, Andy Stone, said on X that the company would do so, for now: "We've heard publishers' feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update. We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders."
Meta maintains it was never going to use the terms to bypass robots.txt signals, and it has reminded business-page owners that "our crawling practices remain unchanged." But the revised terms still contain no explicit language committing to honor robots.txt preferences — leaving publishers and regulators watching closely for what Meta proposes once its "consultation" period, which the company says could run past Nov. 20, concludes.