isn't this crawler to generate previews on Facebook? they have others for training and AI stuff. oh well, one never knows with Meta...
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The facebookexternalhit/1.1 user agent you're seeing in the logs is a Facebook crawler, specifically used by Facebook’s servers to fetch content (like Open Graph metadata) when:
Someone shares a link on Facebook or Messenger
Facebook needs to generate a preview (title, image, description) for that URL
that's a cool experience. it's really mesmerizing and calming watch one or two of these machines, because of the way the waves move, similar to ocean waves. there's this video that shows it at the end: https://youtu.be/mYLvRaMmfho
that's a comparison in the previous week, when there was a clear spike in traffic — if you use the mouseover you'll see there's a reason for that spike.
Hey there. I can provide some more details. Our data doesn't show as much of a drop in Mississippi compared to Arkansas. However, in cases where traffic is higher than usual during the day (as it was in Mississippi and Louisiana), the drop compared with the previous week is even less noticeable using this method.
