Meta Was Scraping Sites for Years While Fighting the Practice

  • Facebook parent is engaged in legal crackdown on data scrapers
  • Target in suit provided scraping services to Meta for years

Since 2021 Meta has cracked down on companies that scrape data from its platform.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. for years paid a contractor to scrape data from other websites while publicly condemning the practice and suing companies that pulled data from its own social-media platforms.

Meta’s scraping surfaced in legal documents filed in a California court case in which the social media giant sued the Israel-based data collection company Bright Data for harvesting and selling information drawn from Facebook and Instagram.