Meta Pauses Nov 20 Scraping Terms After Norway, Brazil Rulings

Meta has indefinitely paused the commercial terms update it was set to impose on November 20, pulling down the preview link and posting that "These updates are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026," Nieman Lab reported. The change would have let the company scrape websites belonging to Meta Business account users.

The retreat followed pressure from three jurisdictions at once. Courts in Norway issued a preliminary injunction blocking the terms. A Brazilian court prohibited Meta from using journalistic content without authorization. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation into whether Meta was "abusing a dominant position by imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers."

In Washington, Senators Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent letters to CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw the terms, joining UK politicians and German publishers already in protest.

Meta VP Andy Stone had tried to defuse the fight a week earlier. "We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders," he wrote on October 28. By November 5 the company gave up on the deadline entirely: "We're pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right," the posted statement reads.

The proposal had been shrinking since reporters first surfaced it on October 15. The next day Meta stripped the word "train" from the policy and narrowed scraped content use to "advertising and business products." On October 23 it pushed the effective date out to November 20 to buy time. The climbdown arrives alongside a broader run of regulation friction for the big model builders, and marks the 30th copyright story our tracker has logged in 90 days.