Meta postpones rollout of new terms after publisher concerns over AI data use

Meta announced that the enforcement date for its new business terms will be moved to November 20, after publishers raised alarms that the provisions might enable the platform to scrape news sites for AI training purposes. The terms were set to take effect on October 30, but objections from media organizations worldwide led the company to reconsider. While Meta has removed explicit references to "training" from the draft, concerns persist that the changes do not fully prevent large-scale content harvesting.

A letter from the News/Media Alliance to Mark Zuckerberg demanded revisions, citing potential severe harm to publishers. Advertisers and publishers in the European Union and the United Kingdom have also urged regulators to block the rollout. Meta’s spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the delay will give the firm time to explain its crawling practices and reaffirm that site owners can still use robots.txt to control access.