Meta shelves its new ad terms and names no new date

Four documents are affected: the Commercial Terms, the Self-Serve Ad Terms, the product catalogue terms and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. On 31 October we reported that Meta had paused the Commercial Terms roll-out on 28 October, and our guide logged banners still showing 20 November that day. Now every document is on hold, and Meta tells Nieman Lab it wants more time with stakeholders.

Pressure had built on several fronts. Nieman Lab counts preliminary injunctions, which are temporary court orders, from Norway and Brazil, a letter to Mark Zuckerberg from Senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn, and the UK competition regulator’s investigation. Critics read the rewrite as a licence to collect content from the websites of business account holders, and Meta had already cut the word train from the list of uses.

Our guide to the terms, updated on 6 November, compares the texts line by line. When we read them on 31 October, section 6 of the Self-Serve Ad Terms of 22 August 2025, the version that stays in force, let Meta crawl your URLs, meaning its software reads those pages, for uses that include research and training.

So the extra crawling powers in the rewrite never start, and the 2025 permission to crawl your URLs for uses that include research and training stays in force.