Meta U-turns on incredibly controversial change to how Instagram and Facebook would work - The Independent

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Meta has U-turned on a controversial change to the way that Instagram and Facebook would work.

The company, which also owns Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads, has faced sustained criticism since it announced new terms for people with business accounts on its platforms. Those rules initially gave Instagram and Facebook the ability to scrape a users’ website and use it to train their models.

The updated terms led to global outcry after they were first reported in mid-October. Critics including politicians in both the US and UK voiced their opposition to the rules, arguing that they were not respecting publishers and other business owners by forcing them to give up control of their own websites if they wanted to keep using Meta’s platforms.

Over the weeks that followed, Meta continue to try and limit the outcry with a range of public statements and changes to the terms. The company removed the word “train” from the new rules, for instance, in the hope of stopping users’ worries that their work would be fed into AI systems.

Now, however, Meta says that it has “paused” the updates and that they would not go into effect on 20 November, as planned. That deadline was initially set for 30 October, but has already been pushed back repeatedly in the time since it was first announced.

“We are continuing to consult with stakeholders and will provide a further update when we have more to share,” an updated page on Meta’s Business Help Centre reads. “In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect.””