Meta suspends change to terms that Canadian publishers feared would open news sites to AI data extraction
Julia Perreira, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed the pause in an email and said the company needs time to talk with stakeholders.
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Meta has suspended a change to its terms of use that Canadian news publishers feared would allow data from websites linked to a professional account to be extracted for artificial intelligence purposes.
Julia Perreira, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed the suspension in an email, saying the pause will give the company time to talk with stakeholders.
Meta has blocked Canadian news content on its platforms under the Online News Act, and the new terms would have reached those publishers' websites as well. European and British publishers shared the concern and had asked governments and regulators to step in.
Some Canadian outlets already use the robots.txt file to block AI crawlers such as OpenAI's. La Presse canadienne is among the media organizations that have sued OpenAI and Anthropic over the use of copyrighted content to train AI systems.
