THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Meta has paused updates to its Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, which were due on 20 November; existing terms stay in force.
  • The draft terms would have allowed automated crawling of pages linked to any business using Meta's products, which legal experts said could feed its AI models.
  • Meta says it will keep consulting stakeholders and has given no date for a revised version; courts in Norway and Brazil had already issued preliminary injunctions against the terms.

Meta has put on hold a planned overhaul of the rules that govern businesses and advertisers on its platforms. In a notice on its business help pages, the company said the updates would not take effect on 20 November 2026 and that the current terms remain in place while it keeps consulting stakeholders. It promised a further update but gave no timetable. The pause, announced on Thursday, 5 November, was also reported by Reuters on Friday.

What was in the terms

The paused changes cover four documents: the Commercial Terms, the Product Catalog Terms, the Self-Serve Ad Terms and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. As first reported by Nieman Lab in October, the new wording would have let Meta use automated tools to crawl web pages linked to a business and pull content from them. It applied to any company using Meta's products, even one that only runs a Facebook Page, so news sites were directly affected. Legal experts consulted by Nieman Lab said the material could be used to train Meta's AI.

Meta has argued that the update mainly gathered crawling rules already scattered across several documents, and that site owners can still block its crawler through robots.txt, although the terms did not say so, The Next Web notes. According to 404 Media, citing Nieman Lab, Meta had already narrowed the draft before the pause, dropping training from the listed uses and limiting them to advertising and business products. A spokesperson told Reuters the company wanted to "take our time to get this right."

Mounting resistance

The terms were originally due on 30 October and were first pushed back after complaints to European and UK regulators. Pressure grew from there. In Norway, a court granted a temporary injunction after a case backed by the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association and about 180 media companies; a court in Brazil also issued a preliminary injunction following a lawsuit by local media. In the US, the News/Media Alliance urged Meta to withdraw the terms, and Senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking the same.

The pause does not end the regulatory scrutiny. The UK Competition and Markets Authority, which opened a formal investigation into the terms, said it would continue examining them, and the European Commission is assessing a complaint from publishers, according to The Next Web. Meta has not said whether a future version will change the crawling provisions themselves.