Meta halts plan to mandate AI training on external web content

Meta has indefinitely postponed its planned update to commercial terms, which would have required Meta Business account users to permit the company to use extensive AI training data from external websites linked on Facebook. This decision followed weeks of public pushback. A spokesperson for Meta informed Reuters that the pause was necessary while the company continued to consult with stakeholders and ensure the changes were implemented correctly. Prior to the delay, legal specialists had cautioned Nieman Lab that the proposed vague language in the terms of service could enable Meta to disregard scraping preferences set in robots.txt files and conduct comprehensive crawling of off-Facebook content for AI purposes. Nieman Lab had previously warned that this could allow Meta to bypass significant licensing fees from news publishers whose content appears on Facebook.