Meta pushes new business terms to November 20th after publisher backlash

The dispute centers on language rather than a completed change. Meta had already updated the terms to remove references to 'training' its products, but legal experts argued that edit was not enough to rule out the possibility of AI training on scraped news content. Digital advertisers and publishers in the European Union and the UK also asked regulators to force Meta to halt the terms, widening the pressure beyond US trade groups.

Meta's response is a delay, not a rewrite. Roberts framed the extra time as a chance to explain 'how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences.' That puts the emphasis on an established opt-out mechanism rather than on changing the terms themselves, suggesting Meta intends to keep the substance while clarifying how it is applied. Whether publishers treat that explanation as sufficient before November 20th is the open question.