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Title: While Meta Crawls the Web for AI Training Data, Bruce Ediger Pranks
Them with Endless Bad Data

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/15/2023...

From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger: Early in March 2025,
I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of meta-
externalagent/1.1
(+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler) was
hitting my blog's machine at an unreasonable rate. I followed the URL and
discovered this is what Meta uses to gather premium, human-generated content
to train its LLMs. I found the rate of requests to be annoying. I already
have a PHP program that creates the illusion of an infinite website. I
decided to answer any HTTP request that had "meta-externalagent" in its user
agent string with the contents of a bork.php generated file... This worked
brilliantly. Meta ramped up to requesting 270,000 URLs on May 30 and 31,
2025... After about 3 months, I got scared that Meta's insatiable consumption
of Super Great Pages about condiments, underwear and circa 2010 C-List celebs
would start costing me money. So I switched to giving "meta-externalagent" a
404 status code. I decided to see how long it would take one of the highest
valued companies in the world to decide to go away. The answer is 5 months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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