X updates its Terms to prohibit crawling/scraping of its data

skilledtothegills@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 336 points –
X updates its Terms to prohibit crawling/scraping of its data
stackdiary.com

But what if you do? Will you get caught?

44

If it's publicly accessible it's scrape-able. He already tried to make tweets not publicly accessible and look how long that lasted.

It’s not even clear that it’s illegal to scrape publicly available data, so I don’t know what the TOS would be enforcing.

It didn't have to be illegal for them to sue you for violating its policies. It would be a civil suit for damages.

Lol, then they would have to demonstrate that there were damages. The worst a TOS violation will get you is a ban.

Unfortunately, they have more money to blow on legal fees. The threat of a suit is enough to keep most perks from fucking around and finding out.

Would it be violating policy if the scrapper only took the public data and never actually signed the ToS since they didn't make an account?

It's not publicly available anymore. If you're not logged in you don't see anything anymore except tweets you have a direct link to. Even then you don't see any replies and the amount of tweets per day you can see is limited.

Yep, would never remember on the odd occasions I would look at Twitter, then just leave the site after being prompted to login

Lol this has the same energy as those NFT idiots crying about people taking screenshots of their stupid monkeys.

Noooo, stop scraping my dataaaa!

And the next generation of AI probably only needs a fraction of the data it needs now so the need to scrape the data is gone.

He's still mad at those researchers for scraping the data that shows that ever since he took over, the antisemitism, racism and general bigotry has gone up on the platform.

I’m pretty sure both parties must agree to the terms before they legally bind anyone so wouldn’t this just apply to logged in users?

How on earth will do they plan on enforcing that? xD

They don't have to enforce it. If someone says bad things about Twitter by analysing their content, Twitter can sue them scraping.

This is hilariously unenforceable as long as Twitter is on the public internet.

I thought this was an article about the X Windows system based on the preview for the article. Boy are those two similar-looking.

Realistically, very little people know about x windows system even less care about it.

When Elon bought Twitter I was hopeful- I strongly believe the world needs an open, free-speech based, 'public square'. The problem with the Internet right now is many 'public squares' are privately owned, and those private companies cater to advertisers more than users.

Sadly I don't think it's worked out that well. I think Twitter is probably better off than they were, but you can't have a public square without openness. And while Twitter/X is now more free, it's also less open.

"more free" my dude people who pay $8 per month get their replies boosted up above everyone else. What are you talking about?

More free in that the moderation doesn't have a bias. I think any bias is harmful, be it Left or Right leaning. I much prefer the current approach of fact checking posts with community notes over hiding posts that are deemed undesirable.

Didn't our little Free Speech Absolutist™️ ban the "slurs" cis and cisgender while also banning folks who misgender cis folks while supporting those who do the same to trans folks? (To say nothing of the removal of lots and lots of other legal speech that he did not like. If that's what unbiased looks like to you, I think that you may want to examine your own biases.