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Meta halts commercial terms update after backlash over AI data use
Meta has indefinitely paused a planned update to its commercial terms after publishers, regulators and lawmakers raised concerns that it would let the company use content from websites linked on Facebook for AI development. The proposal mattered because businesses with Facebook pages would have had to allow Meta to crawl those sites to keep their pages, potentially bypassing publishers’ control over their content and licensing arrangements.
Meta said existing terms remain in effect while it consults stakeholders. The changes were first due on 30 October, then delayed to 20 November; legal challenges in Brazil and Norway led to preliminary injunctions, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation. Meta says its crawling practices are unchanged and content owners can still use robots.txt to express preferences, but critics noted the revised terms did not explicitly promise to respect those preferences.
In short
- Meta has indefinitely paused its proposed commercial terms update.
- Publishers feared the rules would enable extensive AI training on linked websites.
- Courts and regulators in several countries scrutinised the proposal.
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Originally published by Ars Technica as ““Does Meta think we can’t read?” Meta abandons sketchy commercial terms update.”.