🕸️Meta Pauses Terms Update That Would Let It Crawl Publisher Sites for AI

Your linked sites might be Meta's AI training data

Meta just shelved its plan to let it train AI on the open web through Business terms of service. The update was set for October 30, then pushed to November 20, and now it's indefinitely delayed. Pushback came from users, courts, and regulators worldwide. If you run a site linked from a Facebook Business page, this one hits you. The draft terms would have let Meta crawl any external site linked on Facebook and ignore robots.txt preferences. Legal experts flagged the vague language as the real problem. Meta also said it would never use its terms to skirt robots.txt, yet it added no specific language to back that up. The numbers that made publishers nervous: Nieman Lab warned Meta could dodge millions in licensing fees. The terms even asked publishers to create test credentials so Meta's bots could bypass paywalls. Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions, and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal probe into whether Meta is abusing a dominant position. Meta's comms VP says crawling practices remain unchanged. Watch whether the delay becomes a quiet rewrite.