Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.
”Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the internet and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way.“Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says.
The limits will start “ramping up” today, and Reddit says it reached out to the Internet Archive “in advance” to “inform them of the limits before they go into effect,” according to Rathschmidt. He says Reddit has also “raised concerns” about the ability of people to scrape content from the Internet Archive in the past.
Reddit has a recent history of cutting off access to scraper tools as AI companies have begun to use (and abuse) them en masse, but it’s willing to provide that data if companies pay. Last year, Reddit struck a deal with Google for both Google Search and AI training data early last year, and a few months later, it started blocking major search engines from crawling its data unless they pay. It also said its infamous API changes from 2023, which forced some third-party apps to shut down, leading to protests, were because those APIs were abused to train AI models.
Reddit also struck an AI deal with OpenAI, but it sued Anthropic in June, claiming Anthropic was still scraping from Reddit even after Anthropic said it wasn’t scraping anymore.
“We have a longstanding relationship with Reddit and continue to have ongoing discussions about this matter,” Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, says in a statement to The Verge.
Update, August 11th: Added statement from the Wayback Machine.
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