Meta‘s Content Scraping: How One Blogger Fought Back & What It Means for You
Have you ever wondered where the vast amounts of data powering Artificial Intelligence (AI) come from? Increasingly, it’s sourced directly from the web – and not always with permission. In early 2025, a interesting battle unfolded between a blogger and meta, revealing the lengths to which tech giants will go to fuel their Large Language Models (LLMs). This isn’t just a tech story; it’s a critical discussion about data scraping, content ownership, and the future of the internet. This article dives deep into the details of this incident, its implications, and what you can do to protect your online content.
The Discovery: An Unreasonable Crawl Rate
It all began in March 2025 when interface expert Bruce Ediger noticed an unusually high volume of requests from a web crawler identifying itself as meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler). This wasn’t typical sharing activity.The crawl rate was excessive, raising immediate red flags.
Digging deeper, Ediger discovered Meta was systematically harvesting content from his blog – and likely countless others - to train its LLMs. This practice, known as web scraping, involves automatically extracting data from websites. While not inherently illegal, the ethical implications are notable, especially when done at scale without consent.
Did You Know?
Recent research indicates that LLMs require massive datasets – often in the terabyte range – for effective training. This demand is driving a surge in web scraping activity, raising concerns about copyright infringement and data privacy.
The Ingenious Response: A Digital Illusion
Ediger, a seasoned web developer, didn’t take the aggressive scraping lying down. He leveraged his existing PHP programme designed to create the illusion of an infinite website. Instead of blocking the Meta crawler, he decided to feed it a diet of deliberately nonsensical content generated by a file named bork.php.
This was a brilliant move. Meta, seemingly undeterred, ramped up its requests, peaking at an remarkable 270,000 URLs on May 30th and 31st, 2025. The crawler was relentlessly consuming the fabricated data, highlighting the sheer scale of Meta’s content acquisition efforts.
Pro Tip:
If you suspect your website is being aggressively scraped, analyze your server logs for unusual crawl patterns. Look for user agents associated with known scraping bots or companies engaged in LLM growth.
The Experiment: How Long Would Meta Persist?
After three months, Ediger grew concerned about potential bandwidth costs associated with serving the endless stream of requests. He switched tactics, returning a 404 error code to the meta-externalagent crawler. This was a test: how long would one of the world’s moast valuable companies continue to pursue content from a single, autonomous blog?
The answer was five months. In November 2025, the Meta crawler simply stopped requesting pages from Ediger’s site. This suggests a threshold for persistence, potentially based on the perceived value of the content or the cost of continued scraping.
Understanding the Implications of Data Scraping
This incident raises several crucial questions:
* Is data scraping ethical? While legal in many jurisdictions, scraping without permission raises ethical concerns about content ownership and fair use.
* What are the risks to website owners? Excessive scraping can strain server resources,impacting website performance and potentially incurring costs.
* How can you protect your content? we’ll explore practical strategies in the next section.
* What is the future of content on the internet? Will AI-driven scraping fundamentally alter the landscape of online information?
