Re:Triggering Video Playback with Bots and Crawlers
by mcphilip on Friday December 22, 2017 @11:03PM
(#15992850)
> 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, Iād 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.
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.