Meta has paused planned updates to its ‌Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms and Ad Creative Generative ⁠AI Terms, meaning the changes will not take effect on November 20, 2026, the company said yesterday.

“We’re pausing the ‌changes ⁠as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our ⁠time to get this right. In the meantime, ⁠our existing terms remain in ⁠effect,” a Reuters report yesterday quoted a Meta spokesperson as saying.

Meanwhile, other media reports indicated that the pause was necessitated  owing to global protests over website crawling by Meta apps — especially the sites belonging to news organisations.

Meta has paused its controversial updates to four sets of commercial and advertising terms, withdrawing their planned November 20, 2026, implementation date, amid mounting protests from news organisations and regulatory scrutiny worldwide.

In a statement, Meta said it was continuing consultations with stakeholders and would announce a fresh update when further information became available.

The company clarified that its existing terms would remain in effect until further notice.

The proposed changes, particularly provisions concerning automated website crawling linked to Meta business accounts, had triggered widespread criticism from news publishers and legal experts over concerns that scraped content could be used for artificial intelligence training.According to Nieman Lab, which first reported on the proposed terms on October 15, Meta had repeatedly postponed their implementation following protests from publishers, politicians and industry bodies.

The controversy has also attracted legal and regulatory intervention. Courts in Norway and Brazil issued preliminary injunctions blocking the terms, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched a formal investigation into Meta’s practices.

The European Commission has also been reviewing the matter.

Meta, however, clarified that its crawling practices remain unchanged. It said website owners could continue communicating their crawling preferences through robots.txt.