“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Meta abandons sketchy commercial terms update.

After weeks of backlash—and a failed attempt to quell it—Meta has indefinitely delayed plans to update its commercial terms and require Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on 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.

Soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes, legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the vague language could allow the company to ignore scraping preferences specified in robots.txt files and exhaustively crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Since virtually every news publisher has a Facebook page, Nieman Lab sounded the alarm that Meta could potentially avoid millions in licensing fees if the TOS update happened as planned.

Ars broke down the changes after Meta announced them, noting that businesses—including news publishers involved in drawn-out legal battles over unwanted AI scraping—had no way to opt out. To keep a business Facebook page, they had to allow Meta to crawl any linked external sites. The terms even required publishers to create test credentials so Meta’s bots could reliably bypass paywalls.

Meta faced global scrutiny

The changes were initially supposed to take effect on October 30. But Meta pushed that date back to November 20 amid pushback from Facebook users, courts, and regulators around the world. Courts in Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions blocking the terms after organizations in those countries promptly filed lawsuits, Nieman Lab reported.

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority also opened a formal investigation into whether Meta was exploiting a dominant position to seize valuable AI training data. In a LinkedIn post, Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK’s News Media Association, pointed to “the continued arrogance of this company to think everyone will just be OK with its actions” as “staggering.”

“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Bamber wrote. He argued that removing the word “train” from the terms of service did little to reassure publishers, since “develop” posed the same threat.

“It’s saying it can use all the content it scrapes to develop ‘any business product’. I mean, come on,” he wrote.

Nieman Lab noted there was bipartisan concern in the US. Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent letters asking Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms.

On October 28, Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, posted on X that Meta would do just that, at least for now.

“We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update,” Stone said. “We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders. We’re committed to getting this right, and as we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms.”

Meta has insisted that it would never use its terms of service to skirt robots.txt. In an update to business page owners, the company offered a “reminder” that “our crawling practices remain unchanged, and content owners can continue to signal their crawling preferences using robots.txt.”

But the company still faced criticism after promising to pull the terms and consult with publishers to get the policy right.

As regulatory and court scrutiny intensified, Nieman Lab noted that Meta took steps to try to assuage publishers’ concerns but “has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service.”

1. Meet *sshole, the vulnerability that lets hackers SSH into Linux devices

2. Sony revives the original Walkman headphones, adds USB-C

3. No more Cybertrucks; Musk moves on from the angular metallic flop

4. Kalshi court losses pile up as judges refuse to block state gambling laws

5. Lawsuit: Man introduced his wife to ChatGPT. She used it to plan his murder.