Meta says it will withdraw controversial commercial terms update for now

Meta said it does not plan to implement, for now, an update to its commercial terms that could require Facebook page owners to authorize the use of linked content for AI training. Andy Stone, the company’s vice president of communications, said consultation with publishers and industry leaders could extend beyond November 20, delaying implementation of the revised terms.

The proposal had drawn criticism because replacing the word “train” with “develop” was seen as failing to address concerns about using scraped content for commercial products. US senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn asked Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms. Meta says its crawling practices have not changed and that content owners can still signal preferences through robots.txt, but Nieman Lab noted that the revised version contained no specific language about respecting those preferences.