Bruce Ediger Provides Misleading Data to Meta for AI Training

In March 2025, interface expert Bruce Ediger noticed excessive activity from Meta’s web crawler, “meta-externalagent/1.1,” on his blog. To counter this, he programmed his site to respond with meaningless content generated by a PHP script, leading to a spike of 270,000 URL requests in late May. Concerned about potential costs from this data scraping, he later switched to issuing 404 status codes to the crawler. Remarkably, it took Meta five months to discontinue its requests.

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