{"id":902,"date":"2026-11-07T15:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T15:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=902"},"modified":"2026-11-07T15:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T15:14:14","slug":"meta-pauses-facebook-business-terms-ai-scraping-backlash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=902","title":{"rendered":"META BLINKS! FACEBOOK\u2019S AI-SCRAPING TERMS ARE ON ICE! | After court injunctions, a UK probe and a senator pile-on, the plan to make page owners hand over their websites is paused indefinitely"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BACK OFF! After weeks of backlash, <strong>Meta<\/strong> has indefinitely delayed new commercial terms that would have required Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on outside websites linked on Facebook, <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2026\/11\/does-meta-think-we-cant-read-meta-abandons-sketchy-commercial-terms-update\/\">Ars Technica<\/a> reports.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.<\/p>\n<p>Why publishers freaked out: legal experts warned Nieman Lab the vague language could let Meta ignore <strong>robots.txt<\/strong> scraping preferences and crawl huge amounts of off-Facebook content. Businesses had <strong>no way to opt out<\/strong>; keeping a Facebook page meant letting Meta crawl any linked site. The terms even required publishers to create <strong>test credentials so Meta\u2019s bots could get past paywalls<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The pressure came from everywhere. The terms were first due <strong>October 30<\/strong>, then pushed to <strong>November 20<\/strong>. Courts in <strong>Brazil and Norway<\/strong> issued preliminary injunctions blocking them. The UK\u2019s <strong>Competition and Markets Authority<\/strong> opened a formal investigation. In the US, Sens. <strong>Adam Schiff<\/strong> (D-Calif.) and <strong>Marsha Blackburn<\/strong> (R-Tenn.) asked Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw them.<\/p>\n<p>Meta swapping the word \u201ctrain\u201d for \u201cdevelop\u201d didn\u2019t help. \u201cDoes Meta think we can\u2019t read?\u201d wrote <strong>Theo Bamber<\/strong>, chief executive of the UK\u2019s News Media Association. \u201cIt\u2019s saying it can use all the content it scrapes to develop \u2018any business product\u2019. I mean, come on.\u201d Meta says its crawling practices are unchanged and site owners can still use robots.txt, but Nieman Lab noted the revised terms never spelled that out.<\/p>\n<p><em>Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2026\/11\/does-meta-think-we-cant-read-meta-abandons-sketchy-commercial-terms-update\/\">Ars Technica<\/a> (with reporting from Reuters and Nieman Lab)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After court injunctions, a UK probe and a senator pile-on, the plan to make page owners hand over their websites is paused indefinitely<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/bb-meta-terms-1107.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}