Meta has postponed the effective date of its updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms from October 30 to November 20, according to a spokesperson who emailed Reuters and Fast Company. The company said the extension gives it more time to explain to partners and stakeholders what is and isn't changing.

The original update would have granted Meta the right to use web scrapers and automated tools to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages and URLs tied to business accounts, and to use content from those pages to develop, improve, research, train and maintain its products and services.

After publishers and other businesses objected, Meta removed the reference to AI training from the language. Critics have since filed complaints with antitrust authorities, and the News Media Alliance, which represents thousands of news organizations in the US and Canada, sent an open letter demanding the terms be withdrawn before October 30, arguing publishers would be forced to hand over their journalism to support products that could compete with them.

Meta said it will explain how its web crawlers work and make clear that content owners and publishers can use robots.txt to signal their preferences and block indexing. Reuters has previously reported that crawlers from multiple AI companies routinely ignore robots.txt instructions.

Source: Engadget