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.
About a half-decade ago, major social media companies finally did something to prevent their platforms from being used to engage in mass surveillance. Prompted by revelations in public records, Twitter and Facebook began cutting off API access to certain data scrapers that sold their services to government agencies. Twitter blocked both Dataminr and Geofeedia from…