The new terms were supposed to take effect on October 30.
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Meta's controversial new commercial terms of use won't be taking effect on October 30 after all. In an email sent to Reuters and Fast Company, a spokesperson said that the company was "extending the effective date of [its] updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to 20 November to allow more time... to explain to [its] partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."
If you'll recall, the company previously shared a planned update to its terms with language saying that Meta would have the right to use web scrapers and automated tools "to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them)" associated with business accounts on the platform. The updated terms would also state that Meta "may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features.
After publishers and other businesses raised concerns, the company changed its language to remove the reference to AI training. Since then, potentially affected entities have submitted complaints to antitrust authorities about the updated terms. The News Media Alliance, which represents thousands of news media organizations in the United States and in Canada, also sent the company an open letter, demanding that it withdraw its revised terms of use before October 30. "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," the organization wrote.
Meta added in its statement that it will explain to its partners how it uses its web crawlers and make it clear that content owners and publishers will be able to use robots.txt. The plain text file will be able to signal the content owners' preferences to crawlers and AI bots and stop them from indexing their content. That said, Reuters previously reported that multiple AI companies' crawlers regularly ignore robots.txt instructions.