Meta has postponed the implementation of its new business terms from 30 October to 20 November following criticism from publishers who say the changes would allow the company to scrape their websites.
Reuters reported on Friday that the delay came a day after the News/Media Alliance called on Meta to withdraw the terms.
A Meta spokesperson said the extension was intended to give the company more time to clarify the changes to its partners and other stakeholders.
The spokesperson said the delay would allow Meta to explain “what’s changing and what’s not”.
The wording that publishers have objected to appeared unchanged, with Meta still planning to implement the terms, Fast Company reported. A Meta spokesperson added that website owners could use robots.txt, a file that instructs web crawlers which pages they can access, to indicate their preferences.
Some technology companies are giving publishers greater control over website crawling. Cloudflare, for instance, now blocks AI training crawlers by default on many pages containing advertisements.
The new terms apply to businesses using Meta’s tools, including advertising services, Facebook Pages and Instagram business accounts. They allow Meta to deploy automated crawlers on websites linked to those accounts and use the content to develop its advertising and business products.
Businesses automatically accept the terms by using the tools, without needing to sign a separate agreement.
Meta removed the word “train” from the terms last week following an outcry over the proposed changes.
Publishers argue that Meta’s revised wording still leaves room for the company to use their content to train artificial intelligence models. Five major publishers are already suing Meta, accusing it of using their books without permission to train its Llama AI models.
The delay came a day after the News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,000 US publishers, wrote to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that the company withdraw the new terms.
The alliance argued that publishers could not effectively block Meta’s web crawlers because doing so could interfere with the operation of advertisements on their websites.
“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them,” the letter said.
