Meta Pauses Planned AI Training Terms for Facebook Business Accounts

Meta has indefinitely postponed a planned update to its commercial terms after weeks of criticism. The proposed changes would have required users of Meta Business accounts to permit extensive artificial-intelligence training on external websites linked through Facebook. The company said its current terms will remain in effect while it continues discussions with stakeholders and works on the update.

Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the proposed wording was unclear and could have allowed Meta to disregard scraping preferences expressed in robots.txt files. They said the company might then be able to crawl large volumes of content hosted outside Facebook for AI training. Because nearly every news publisher maintains a Facebook page, Nieman Lab warned that the proposed terms could have enabled Meta to avoid paying millions of dollars in licensing fees. Meta announced the pause shortly after notifying business account holders about the planned changes. The company did not provide a new timetable for revising or introducing the terms.