Meta allowed websites to scrape for years, while that was not allowed on Facebook

For years, tech giant Meta paid a company to scrape websites, while trying to prevent that practice from taking place on Facebook and Instagram. That writes financial news agency Bloomberg. Meta would not have scraped competitor sites.

With the scraping, Meta wanted to provide profiles of brands on Facebook with content, writes Bloomberg. It also wanted to notice malicious websites and phishing sites with practice. The company that scrape websites for Meta, Bright Data, also offers to scrape data from Twitter and TikTok, among others.

Bloomberg discovered the practice in court documents, which revealed that Meta had a professional relationship with Bright Data until 2021 to get data scraped. Meta opposes this on its own platforms and actively tries to prevent scraping on Facebook and Instagram, among others.

Meta ended its cooperation with Bright Data after discovering that the latter had violated conditions regarding the automated collection and sale of data. That happened last year. Meta has used the services for at least six years, according to the documents.

Bright Data web scraping