Meta has put on hold a set of changes to its business terms that would have applied to anyone running a Facebook page or Meta ad account. The new wording was due on 20 November and would have let Meta crawl websites linked from those accounts. For now, the existing terms stay in force.
Lawyers and publishers read the vague wording as a possible way to ignore robots.txt, the file where a site lists the pages bots must leave alone. Meta said throughout that its crawling practices were unchanged and that site owners can still use robots.txt, though its revised terms never wrote that promise in.
The pause covers four documents: the Commercial Terms, the Product Catalog Terms, the Self-Serve Ad Terms and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. According to Nieman Lab, Meta removed the preview link to the proposed terms on Thursday and added a note to its Business Help Center saying the updates will not take effect on 20 November and that it is still consulting stakeholders. A Meta spokesperson separately described the pause this way: the company is “pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right.”
The terms first drew attention on 15 October, when Nieman Lab reported that they could permit scraping of news sites. A day later Meta cut the word “train” from the text and narrowed the stated purpose to “advertising and business products”. The start date, originally 30 October, slid to 20 November. Critics, among them the UK News Media Association’s chief executive Theo Bamber, said swapping “train” for “develop” changed little.
Pressure came from several directions. Courts in Norway and Brazil issued preliminary injunctions after media groups there sued. Britain’s competition regulator, the CMA, started a formal probe into possible abuse of a dominant position. In the US, senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn separately asked Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms. On 28 October Meta’s communications chief Andy Stone said on X that the company would not change policy without full consultation with industry groups.
The terms also required publishers to set up test credentials so Meta’s bots could get past paywalls, and offered no opt-out short of closing the page. That is why news organisations, nearly all of which keep a Facebook page, reacted so strongly.
Meta has not given a new date and says it will share an update when it has more to say.
