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

“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Bamber wrote. He argued that removing the word “train” from the terms of service did little to reassure publishers, since “develop” posed the same threat.

“It’s saying it can use all the content it scrapes to develop ‘any business product’. I mean, come on,” he wrote.

Nieman Lab noted there was bipartisan concern in the US. Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent letters asking Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the terms.

On October 28, Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, posted on X that Meta would do just that, at least for now.

“We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update,” Stone said. “We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders. We’re committed to getting this right, and as we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms.”

Meta has insisted that it would never use its terms of service to skirt robots.txt. In an update to business page owners, the company offered a “reminder” that “our crawling practices remain unchanged, and content owners can continue to signal their crawling preferences using robots.txt.”

But the company still faced criticism after promising to pull the terms and consult with publishers to get the policy right.

As regulatory and court scrutiny intensified, Nieman Lab noted that Meta took steps to try to assuage publishers’ concerns but “has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service.”