Meta has backed away, for now, from a planned update to its commercial terms that publishers feared could let it use their material to develop products. The company says it will consult industry groups and leaders before making policy changes. If that process runs beyond November 20, Meta says it will delay implementing the updated terms; it has not given a new implementation date.
The dispute centers on wording that publishers said could cover content Meta collects from websites. Critics objected that replacing the word “train” with “develop” did not resolve their concern. Bamber, a critic quoted by Ars Technica, said the terms appeared to allow Meta to use scraped content to develop “any business product.”
What publishers objected to
A key concern is whether the terms could undermine publishers’ ability to tell Meta’s crawlers not to access their sites. Website owners can use robots.txt, a file that signals their preferences to web crawlers. Meta has said its crawling practices are unchanged and that content owners can keep using the file to express those preferences.
That reassurance has not settled the dispute. Nieman Lab noted that Meta’s revised terms still do not include specific language promising to respect robots.txt preferences. The disagreement is therefore about both how Meta says it will crawl websites and what its written terms allow it to do with content it collects.
Meta’s response
On October 28, Meta vice president of communications Andy Stone said on X that the company would not make the proposed policy change without consulting publishers and industry leaders. Stone said the consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case Meta would delay the updated terms. The company has described the withdrawal as a response to feedback, rather than announcing a finalized replacement policy.
The proposal also drew bipartisan attention in the United States: Sens. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw it. The concerns have continued amid regulatory and court scrutiny, while Meta’s public assurances have not yet been matched by explicit robots.txt language in the revised terms.
Why it matters
For publishers and website owners, the pause gives them more time to raise concerns before the terms take effect. Meta says their robots.txt signals remain usable, but its revised terms still do not explicitly promise to honor those preferences, so the practical scope of the policy remains unsettled.
