Meta quietly delays controversial update that critics say will allow website scraping

Earlier this month, Meta Platforms announced controversial new commercial terms of use for business accounts that critics said would give the social media giant broad authority to crawl and scrape web content associated with those accounts. The new commercial terms—met by strong outrage from news publishers that produce online content and rely on Meta’s platforms for distribution—were set to go into effect on Friday, October 30. Now, without any notice, Meta has pushed back the date of the change by three weeks to Friday, November 20. The delay comes one day after a major trade group for news publishers sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that the forthcoming terms be withdrawn. Despite the delayed date, the controversial language in the updated terms appeared to still be intact as of Friday. “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,” a Meta spokesperson told Fast Company when reached for comment, “including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt t…

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