SAN FRANCISCO—A federal judge ordered the release of sworn testimony detailing how a recent Meta TOS revision secretly allowed the tech giant to harvest all human thought. Under cross-examination, executives admitted that removing controversial verbs did not stop their automated web crawlers from consuming the entire internet.
Cross-Examination Of Meta Executives
Q: Please state your full name and occupation for the court record.
A: My name is Arthur Vance. I serve as Lead Legal Euphemist at Meta Platforms.
Q: Mr. Vance, why did your team execute a Meta TOS revision last week?
A: Users panicked when they saw the word 'train' in our terms of service. It sounded too aggressive. So, we deleted the word entirely.
Q: Did you stop using public data to build your artificial intelligence models?
A: Absolutely not. We simply replaced the word 'train' with the word 'aggressively appreciate.'
The Scraping Strategy Revealed
Q: I see. And what about website owners who use robots.txt files to block your crawlers?
A: We view those files as polite suggestions. Our algorithms treat a digital do-not-enter sign as a challenge to scrape faster.
Q: Is it true that Meta now claims ownership over user dreams logged in private messaging apps?
A: We prefer the term 'involuntary cloud backup.' It sounds much more helpful to the consumer.
Q: So every company in Silicon Valley is doing this exact same thing?
A: Of course. My colleague TikTok Chief Vibes Compliance Officer Priya Vantablack explicitly authorized us to ingest her company's user data last Tuesday.
Q: Are you testifying under oath that the entire tech sector ignores property rights?
A: I am saying that terms of service agreements are just long poetry books nobody reads. We own everything now.
Q: No further questions for this witness, Your Honor.
