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Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping

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Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping

The new commercial terms—met by strong outrage from news publishers that produce online content and rely on Meta’s platforms for distribution—were set to go into effect on Friday, October 30. 

Now, without any notice, Meta has pushed back the date of the change by three weeks to Friday, November 20. The delay comes one day after a major trade group for news publishers sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that the forthcoming terms be withdrawn.

Despite the delayed date, the controversial language in the updated terms appeared to still be intact as of Friday.

“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not,” a Meta spokesperson told Fast Company when reached for comment, “including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences.”

Publications, most of which are deeply integrated in Meta’s platforms as part of their business, have since expressed anger at the idea of their content being scraped up by Meta for use however the company chooses. 

Could Meta scrape content from behind a paywall? Could it take publications’ content and use it to compete with them? 

It removed the word “train” from the earlier sentence on ways it would use the content. The tech giant also limited use to “advertising and business products.”


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