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@levelsio (posted 2026-08-06) says Meta staff DM'd him secretly and alleges Meta…

2026-08-06 · 20:44 UTC ·@levelsio ·1 min read

Brief

@levelsio posted on 2026-08-06 claiming Meta staff DM'd him and alleging Meta is building a proprietary Google-style web index to keep AI searches from routing to Google. He says heavy scraping this week hit his sites, caused load‑average alerts on one VPS, and specifically hit url2og (screenshots), implying image/video or world-model data collection.

Why it matters

@levelsio (posted 2026-08-06) says Meta staff DM'd him secretly and alleges Meta is building its own Google-like web index/search engine so Meta's AI web queries won't go to Google (which could use those results to train models).

Key details

  • @levelsio reports heavy scraping of his sites this week that triggered load-average alerts on one VPS and targeted url2og (his screenshot service), suggesting Meta is scraping images (and possibly video/world-model data); he notes these stats are just from url2og and tags @finkd and @cloudflare.
Source evidence

Meta staff DM'd me secretly

Posted with permission

Meta is ALLEGEDLY building their own Google search engine, so that if their AI does a web search it doesn't end up at Google, as Google could then use it for THEIR training, so they want their own web index that they will then use as their own Meta search engine for their AI

Interesting 🤔

@levelsio (@levelsio)

Meta is doing heavy heavy heavy scraping on all my sites this week too (and seemingly everyone else's sites now)

So much so that I got load average alerts for it today on one VPS

The fact that they're hitting url2og (my own screenshot service for all my sites) might they're scraping not just text but images too, so maybe they're working on an image, video or just world model

P.S. these stats are just from url2og not even my other sites!

You're welcome @finkd but maybe I should start charging you for it with @cloudflare 😊

— https://nitter.net/levelsio/status/2085399058261442569#m