Meta pulls controversial commercial terms update after publisher backlash
Meta says it will not enforce its proposed ads and business terms changes without consulting the industry. Publishers feared the company could use their content to develop its own products.
Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has backed away from plans to introduce updated advertising and business terms on November 20. Media publishers objected to the changes, arguing they would give the company broad rights to use content collected from the web. The issue matters because it touches on how technology firms may use publishers' material.
Criticism from publishers
Publisher representative Bamber criticized the removal of the word "train" from the terms while the word "develop" remained. In his view, this posed the same risk, since the terms would let the company use all scraped content to develop "any business product."
Nieman Lab, a journalism outlet, noted that concern was bipartisan in the US. Senators Adam Schiff (Democrat, California) and Marsha Blackburn (Republican, Tennessee) sent letters to Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw the terms.
Meta's response
On October 28, Meta's vice president of communications, Andy Stone, said on the social network X that the company would do so, at least for now. He said Meta had heard publishers' feedback and did not plan to change policy without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders. Stone added that the consultation could run past November 20, in which case implementation of the updated terms would be delayed.
Meta has insisted it would never use its terms of service to get around robots.txt, a file website owners use to tell automated crawlers how they may access a site. The company reminded business page owners that its crawling practices remain unchanged.
Criticism nevertheless continued. Nieman Lab pointed out that the revised terms contain no specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences.
