The Verge reported on 23 October that Meta is pushing its new business terms back from 30 October to 20 November. Publishers had raised concerns that the terms appeared to let Meta scrape news sites that use its platforms and use the material for AI training. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge the extra time will help Meta explain to partners what is changing and what is not.
Meta had already removed wording about training its products, The Verge said. Legal experts argued that this does not rule out the scraping. The News/Media Alliance wrote to Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, asking Meta to revise the terms and warning of severe harm to publishers. The Verge also said advertisers and publishers in the EU and the UK urged regulators to make Meta halt the terms. The report does not say whether Meta will change the text again, or how any regulator has responded.
Roberts said Meta will explain how its web crawlers work. He added that content owners can still use robots.txt, a small file that tells crawlers which pages they may visit. For anyone who publishes on Meta's platforms or runs a site that Meta might crawl, the new date gives more time before the terms apply.