Senator Blackburn says Meta's planned Commercial Terms update could harm creators and businesses, urges withdrawal

On October 23, 2026, U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee Republican, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law) criticized Meta Platforms' planned update to its Commercial Terms, saying the language could harm American businesses, creators and publishers and could give Meta broad authority to collect content from websites linked to Facebook and Instagram business accounts. Blackburn said the revisions removed an explicit reference to AI training but still appeared to authorize broad scraping and the development of business products using collected material, and she called on Meta to withdraw the updated terms and negotiate protections for creators and publishers. Meta said the same day it would delay the change from October 30 to November 20 while addressing publisher and advertiser concerns; Meta said the revised terms apply only to its ads and business products, do not change how it uses web crawlers, and do not create new rights to override website preferences such as robots.txt. This letter is a distinct pressure event in the ongoing Commercial Terms controversy, separate from the delay announcement itself.