Meta has announced that its controversial new commercial terms will no longer go into effect on October 30. In a statement sent to Reuters and Fast Company, a company spokesperson said the effective date for the updated Commercial Terms and Self‑Serve Ad Terms has been pushed to November 20 to give partners and stakeholders more time to understand the changes.
The revision originally gave Meta the right to employ web scrapers and automated tools to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” the domains, web pages or URLs linked to business accounts on its platforms. It also indicated that Meta could use any content from those sources “to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of” its products, services and features. After pushback from publishers and other businesses, Meta removed the reference to AI training from the language. The amended terms have since been the subject of complaints filed with antitrust regulators.
The News Media Alliance, which represents thousands of news outlets across the United States and Canada, sent an open letter to Meta demanding that the revised terms be withdrawn before the original deadline. “News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” the alliance wrote.
In its response, Meta said it will clarify to partners how its web crawlers operate and confirm that content owners will still be able to use a robots.txt file to indicate their preferences. The plain‑text file can tell crawlers and AI bots not to index certain material. Reuters, however, noted that many AI‑related crawlers routinely disregard robots.txt instructions.