Dropsitenews published a list of websites Facebook uses to train its AI on. Multiple Lemmy instances are on the list as noticed by user BlueAEther

Hexbear is on there too. Also Facebook is very interested in people uploading their massive dongs to lemmynsfw.

Full article here.

Link to the full leaked list download: Meta leaked list pdf

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
      331·
      15 days ago

      Linked article in the body suggests that likely wouldn’t have made a difference anyway

      The scrapers ignored common web protocols that site owners use to block automated scraping, including “robots.txt” which is a text file placed on websites aimed at preventing the indexing of context

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        23·
        15 days ago

        Yeah ive seen the argument in blog posts that since they are not search engines they dont need to respect robots.txt. Its really stupid.

    • Pamasich@kbin.earth
      3·
      15 days ago

      If they have a brain, and they do have the experience from Threads, they don’t need to scrape Lemmy. They can just set up a shell instance, subscribe to Lemmy communities, and then use federation to get their data for free. That doesn’t use robots.txt at all regardless.