Key facts
- Meta paused updates to four sets of business terms, including its Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms.
- Meta said the changes will not take effect on November 20, 2026, the date they had been due.
- A Meta spokesperson said existing terms remain in effect while the company engages with stakeholders.
- Meta spokesman Andy Stone said on October 16 the update concerned product information on third-party sites, not scraping news sites.
- The UK Competition and Markets Authority said on October 30 it was investigating whether the terms imposed unfair trading conditions.
- The Norwegian Media Businesses' Association said the postponement was insufficient and set out three demands.
Meta said on November 6, 2026 that it had paused planned updates to its Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, so the changes will not take effect on November 20, 2026. A spokesperson said: "We're pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right. In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect."
The terms had drawn objections from media companies and open-web advocates, who said the updated rules would let Meta use automated software such as web scrapers and bots to index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs associated with a business account, without payment. Critics said Meta could use the content to build products such as AI services competing with news publishers. The terms applied to business accounts; regular users of Instagram and Facebook can already have public posts scraped to train AI models, according to the report.
A court in Norway granted a temporary injunction on October 28 suspending the new terms at the request of 180 Norwegian media companies, pending a full assessment of their legality. The Norwegian Media Businesses' Association, whose member newspapers account for approximately 97% of Norwegian newspaper circulation, supported the case. Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, MBL chair of the board, said: "We are satisfied that the court has agreed with us that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable."
The UK Competition and Markets Authority said on October 30 it was starting its own investigation. "The CMA is concerned that Meta requiring news publishers and other content businesses to accept these terms could amount to an unlawful imposition of unfair trading conditions," it said.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote on X on October 16 that the update was designed to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites for on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites. His comments followed a report by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, which said that as written the terms could be used to argue Meta can scrape news content and use it to train AI products; the lab said it consulted three legal experts. Meta later removed the word "train" from the updated terms, according to the report.