
Triggering Video Playback with Bots and Crawlers - urlgrey
https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sheep-how-bots-react-to-web-video-2/
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urlgrey
Post author here: this post was written in June 2017, and the subject has
become increasingly relevant since the MySpace video advertising bot fraud
reported by BuzzFeed on October 27, 2017:
[https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/remember-
tom](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/remember-tom)

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maccam94
The conclusion that Facebook has bots other than Facebot is interesting. I
wonder if Scott was able to identify how many problematic user agent strings
were on Facebook's network.

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urlgrey
Great question! There was a fairly even distribution of slow-performing
requests across the many user-agent strings coming from the Facebook ASN.

My hunch is that the Facebook crawlers send user-agent strings that Facebook
has seen in requests to their own services. This allows them to crawl content
in linked posts masquerading as a device that their users would actually use.

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mcphilip
> My hunch is that the Facebook crawlers send user-agent strings that Facebook
> has seen in requests to their own services. This allows them to crawl
> content in linked posts masquerading as a device that their users would
> actually use.

Very interesting theory, I’d love a follow up post if this can eventually be
confirmed or denied :). That would be very clever of FB but very, very rude to
all of the small fish they crawl.

