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

Meta has decided to suspend indefinitely the update to its commercial terms that would have required business account users to allow its AI systems to train on content from external sites linked through Facebook. The move came after weeks of criticism and a failed attempt to quell the controversy, which included removing the word “train” from the draft terms. A company spokesperson told Reuters that the pause allows continued dialogue with stakeholders and fine‑tuning of the proposal, while keeping current conditions in force.

Law experts cautioned Nieman Lab that the ambiguous wording of the new text could enable Meta to ignore robots.txt directives and scrape large amounts of off‑platform content to train its models, potentially sparing it from paying licensing fees to news publishers who own pages on the social network. The concern centered on the possibility that the company could sidestep licensing costs that could reach millions of dollars.

This decision is significant because it illustrates the pressure from the community and regulators on major tech firms to clearly define the limits of using external data for AI training—a matter that affects both content creators and end users.

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