Meta has paused its proposed website-crawling terms for business accounts on Facebook and Instagram. In a notice quoted by The Independent in a Reuters-credited report, Meta said the changes would not take effect on their planned Nov. 20 date and that its existing terms remain in force while consultation continues. The company said it would provide another update.
Meta had earlier moved the planned effective date from Oct. 30 to Nov. 20, a delay covered in NeoTeo’s earlier report on the proposed business terms.
What Meta paused
The proposed terms described permissions for automated tools to index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl domains, pages and URLs associated with business accounts, according to an Associated Press report published by the Los Angeles Times.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the intended use was to retrieve accurate product information from third-party websites for advertising and content recommendations on Meta’s platforms, not to scrape news sites. Publishers and legal experts cited in the Los Angeles Times report warned that the broad wording could allow wider uses, including AI development.
A stated purpose and the reach of proposed contract wording are separate questions.
Public-post scraping is a separate reported practice
The Los Angeles Times also reported that Meta may already be scraping public posts by ordinary Facebook and Instagram users for AI training. Those posts are a separate subject from the paused business-account terms.
Court and regulator actions
The Los Angeles Times reported that a Norwegian court granted a temporary injunction on Oct. 28 at the request of 180 media companies, pending a fuller assessment of the terms’ legality. On Oct. 30, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority said it was beginning an investigation into the proposed conditions.
