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…