Meta announced Thursday that it has indefinitely delayed its proposal to scrape the websites of Meta Business account users.
On Thursday, various sources tracking the Menlo Park-based tech giant reported that the company took down a preview link to the proposed terms and published this update in its Business Help Center:
“We recently shared that we were updating the Meta Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms, and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. These updates are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026. We are continuing to consult with stakeholders and will provide a further update when we have more to share. In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect.”
U.S. and European news publishers and their legal teams had warned that Meta was attempting to force news organizations to provide their content free of charge to support AI products that would compete with them for readers and advertisers.
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California said this week he had sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging Meta not to implement its new commercial terms.
“Forcing publishers to choose between surrendering their off-platform IP or forfeiting a primary channel of public communication is a gross abuse of Meta’s power as a powerful platform with critical access to consumers,” Schiff wrote in letter, first reported by media news service Nieman Lab. “Meta must not nullify federal IP protections and fair market competition through the unilateral insertion of fine print into terms of service contracts.”
The day before Meta’s announcement, four European press associations — the European Magazine Media Association, the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the European Press Council, and News Media Europe — sent a joint letter to the European Commission and its heads of technology and competition, Nieman Lab reported this week.
The European press associations claimed that Meta’s plan violates the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2020 to curb the dominance of big tech companies.
Meta was planning to use “web scrapers” to crawl and collect content from websites associated with business accounts on its platforms, according to its proposed commercial terms of use.
The update withdrawn this week includes news publishers with business accounts. The business accounts allow companies or public figures to manage Facebook pages, Messenger accounts, Instagram profiles, or WhatsApp channels from one place. While journalism wasn’t the only industry affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account.
The new terms covered business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the platform’s business account dashboard. The new terms enable Meta to scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products, according to three legal experts who reviewed the terms at the request of Nieman Lab, a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, based at Harvard University.
In an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published Thursday, News/Media Alliance’s president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote that Meta should “withdraw these terms and should hold discussions around future changes with NMA and publishers.”
Meta’s controversial terms of servuce were first reported by Nieman Lab on Oct. 15,
“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” Coffey said in her letter, as reported by Nieman Lab. “It is wholly unreasonable for the mere use of a Meta business account to require publishers to grant unrestricted access to their websites (and even content posted by their users), for the benefit of Meta to develop its business products.”
Meta — which owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads — has repeatedly pushed back the terms’ effective date since Nieman Lab first reported on them on Oct. 15.
Last week, Meta pledged to consult news publishers and industry leaders ahead of putting new commercial terms into effect.
“We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update. We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders,” vice president of communications Andy Stone tweeted on Oct. 28. “We’re committed to getting this right, and as we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms.”
Since then, Nieman Lab reported that courts in Norway and Brazil have issued preliminary injunctions to block the terms from taking effect as a result of lawsuits filed by media organizations in both countries. The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal investigation into Meta, examining whether the company was “abusing a dominant position by imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers.”
