Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping
Earlier this month, Meta Platforms announced controversial new commercial terms of use for business accounts that critics said would give the social media giant broad authority to crawl and scrape web content associated with those accounts. The new commercial terms—met by strong outrage from news publishers that produce online content and rely on Meta’s platforms for distribution—were set to go…
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, has extended the effective date of controversial new commercial terms of use for business accounts by three weeks to November 20. This move comes after strong criticism from news publishers who fear their content could be scraped and used by Meta in ways that could harm their businesses.
Despite Meta's insistence that the new terms are necessary to update their advertising and business products, news publishers argue that the terms give Meta broad authority to crawl and scrape web content associated with their accounts, potentially allowing the company to compete with them directly. Meta has also removed the word "train" from the contentious language, stating that it was unclear in the initial terms that robots.txt preferences are respected.
However, critics argue that the word "develop" is still broad enough to include "train," allowing Meta to use content in ways that could undermine the financial viability of the free press.
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