Meta Delays Update Amid Concern About Scraping Websites for AI Training | PCMag

UPDATE 10/28: Meta now says it won’t update its ads and business terms until it can consult with the industry, spokesman Andy Stone tweeted today. “We’re committed to getting this right, and…we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms. Until then, our existing terms remain in place.” UPDATE 10/16: Meta appears to have amended the commercial terms to address publishers’ concerns. “The crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” it says. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.” The new terms seem to have removed the word “train” from the section that alarmed publishers. The revised section also mentions applying the web scraping specifically to “advertising and business products.” Original Story: A change to Meta’s commercial terms of service is raising concerns that the company will be free to scrape content from numerous third-party sites for AI training purposes. As Nieman Lab reports, Meta
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