“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Meta abandons sketchy commercial terms update.

Meta has indefinitely delayed a planned update to its commercial terms that would have required business account holders to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook, after weeks of backlash. Legal experts warned the vague language could let Meta ignore robots.txt preferences and crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content, potentially avoiding millions in licensing fees owed to news publishers. The reversal matters because it shows public and legal pressure can still force a Big Tech company to back off an AI data grab.

• Ars Technica2026-11-06 17:43