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

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.