Meta Was Scraping Sites for Years While Fighting the Practice

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.

It’s an ironic turn of events for the company: Email correspondence between the two businesses appears to confirm that Meta had a years-long professional relationship with the data-scraping outfit. Bright Data offers ...