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“Meta has delayed the effective date of its new terms of service for business accounts to November 20 in the face of mounting pressure from the global news industry.
Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15. They would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Virtually every news organization has at least one business account. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.”
The terms were previously set to take effect on October 30, with no way to opt out, setting off an outcry from news publishers, politicians, and press associations on both sides of the Atlantic.
“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not — including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences,” a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab in a statement Friday.
A Meta spokesperson said on October 17 that the company revised the language because it “wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”
As of October 23, Meta has made no other changes to the terms aside from the implementation date. No versions of the terms include language about respecting robots.txt preferences.
Legal experts and news industry leaders remain skeptical of Meta’s statements.
“Publishers should always be concerned about tech companies attempting to take content for free, and should assume that Meta is taking this additional time to either find a new way to try to mislead publishers into granting Meta free access to valuable copyrighted content or finally give up in the face of pressure,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “Publishers don’t need more PR statements or explanations. They need Meta to keep its hands off their copyrighted material and respect publishers’ terms of service.”
“I don’t think that repeating the same non-explanations for another three weeks will make much difference,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, added. “But maybe they’ll use the time to come up with better explanations.”
Thomas Höppner, a professor and attorney specializing in competition law in Germany, told Nieman Lab that “Meta’s conduct constitutes a prima facie infringement of European Union competition law, and a textbook case for imposing interim measures.”
The postponement could be a legal strategy that the company is exploring, he said.
“My fear is that this is merely a measure by Meta to reduce the risk of court actions for interim measures,” Höppner said. “If affected parties wait too long from the day of knowledge of the changes [until] the filing of an action, a court will assume that the matter cannot be urgent — and deny interim relief on this ground…Under some jurisdictions, a platform needs to give business users appropriate warning before implementing measures. It may well be that Meta just tries to reduce the risk of losing on the ground not having sufficiently informed business users about its new terms.”
News publishers and press associations have called on regulators to intervene before the terms take effect, and on Meta to include specific language about respecting publishers’ crawling preferences.
On Thursday, the News/Media Alliance in the United States sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that the company suspend the terms before October 30. The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) sent a similar letter to Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan on the same day.
Multiple European press associations signed a joint letter to the European Commission, citing potential violations of the Digital Markets Act and calling for intervention. Earlier this week, two German publisher associations called on the European Commission to prohibit the new terms from going into effect until a complete review has been conducted.
In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Market Authority sent a formal letter to Meta to discuss the terms. In a parliamentary committee session on Tuesday, executive director Will Hayter said he had a meeting scheduled with the company on Wednesday to learn more about the terms.
“The CMA has been in urgent discussions with Meta this week on this important issue,” a CMA spokesperson said on Friday. “Meta has now paused implementation until 20 November. We will continue to scrutinize these terms and engage with Meta and others as we consider our next steps.”
Theo Bamber, chief executive of the U.K’s News Media Association, wrote on LinkedIn on Friday that “this delay is welcome, but it is a pause not a solution.”
“What needs to happen next is for the Competition and Markets Authority, and other regulators around the world, to secure clear, public commitments from Meta to abandon the offending elements of the new Terms before they take effect,” Bamber said.
