After weeks of backlash—and a failed attempt to quell it—Meta has indefinitely delayed plans to update its commercial terms and require Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook.

"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 Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes, legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the vague language could allow the company to ignore scraping preferences specified in robots.txt files and exhaustively crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Since virtually every news publisher has a Facebook page, Nieman Lab sounded the alarm that Meta could potentially avoid millions in licensing fees if the TOS update happened as planned.

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Over the weekend, the No Kings Coalition said Meta declined to commit to taking steps to prevent automated systems from suspending one of Instagram's most prominent pro-democracy accounts if activity surged around the page during the midterm elections.

A demand for action came after Meta apologized for temporarily suspending the No Kings Instagram account and disabling access for four hours at the peak of an early voting push from the group. In a post on X, Meta’s Andy Stone said the account had been using a Claude AI tool in a way that made it appear to be a bot. But even though automated review detected the error within an hour, Stone acknowledged that additional hurdles kept admins locked out. State and federal lawmakers—as well as a coalition of 14 attorneys general—have asked Meta to further explain its actions.

In a letter to No Kings, Meta offered to arrange a meeting with a technical expert who could better explain the mistake. But No Kings rejected the response, saying it failed to address any of the group's ongoing concerns and requesting a meeting with Meta senior leadership instead. The group stressed that the issue goes beyond its Instagram account, saying that Americans who rely on Meta's platforms need assurance that voting content won’t be suppressed ahead of or on election day. Among eight questions, the coalition asked Meta to publicly disclose any communications with the Trump administration about the No Kings account or the historic early voting day event.

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Meta must pay $25 billion to New Mexico after a jury found the tech giant guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws.

The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.

In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta's repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”

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