“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Meta abandons sketchy commercial terms update.

Meta has decided to postpone indefinitely its plans to update its commercial terms and require users with Meta Business accounts to grant extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook. This decision comes after weeks of criticism and an unsuccessful effort to quell the backlash. The company is pausing the changes as it continues to engage with stakeholders and takes the time to ensure everything is done correctly.

For now, the existing terms remain in effect, according to a Meta spokesperson. Legal experts had raised concerns that the vague language in the proposed changes could enable Meta to disregard scraping preferences outlined in robots.txt files and extensively crawl vast amounts of content from off-Facebook sources for AI training purposes.

Since most news publishers have a Facebook page, this could potentially lead to millions of dollars in licensing fees being avoided if the update had gone through.