Meta has scraped data from the most-trafficked domains on the internet —including news organizations, education platforms, niche forums, personal blogs, and even revenge porn sites—to train its artificial intelligence models, according to a leaked list obtained by Drop Site News.
By scraping data from roughly 6 million unique websites, including 100,000 of the top-ranked domains, Meta has generated millions of pages of content to use for Meta’s AI-training pipeline.
The sites that Meta scrapes consist of copyrighted content, pirated content, and adult videos, some of whose content is potentially illegally obtained or recorded, as well as news and original content from prominent outlets and content publishers.
They include mainstream businesses like Getty Images, Shopify, Shutterstock, but also extreme pornographic content, including websites advertising explicit sexual content and humiliation porn that exploits teenagers.
I blocked the entire ASN for Meta, because they were downright dirty with their scraping. No gradual crawling, fakes UAs, random addresses across a large number of subnets.
They weren’t the only ones either. The AI scraping heist is the new goldrush.