Meta Delays Business Terms After Publisher Pushback on AI Scraping

Meta has delayed enforcement of its new business terms until November 20 after publishers raised concerns that the language could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training. The terms, which were originally scheduled to take effect on October 30, appeared to grant Meta broad permission to crawl websites that use its platforms. Although Meta later revised the language to remove direct references to training its products, legal experts and publisher groups argued that the change did not fully eliminate the risk. The backlash intensified after The News/Media Alliance sent a letter to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg warning that the terms could cause severe harm to publishers. Digital advertisers and publishers in the European Union and the United Kingdom also called on regulators to intervene and block the updated terms. In response, Meta announced that it would postpone implementation. Company spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the delay would give Meta more time to explain what is changing and how the company uses web crawlers. He also emphasized that content owners will continue to be able to use robots.txt files to signal their preferences about automated crawling.