this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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But what if you do? Will you get caught?

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[–] [email protected] 126 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] coffee_poops 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's still a billionaire suing you for those peanuts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Suing for 50 dollar or so? Fine.

[–] coffee_poops 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Salix 2 points 11 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 82 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

Noooo, stop scraping my dataaaa!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Never waste an opportunity to use "muh" in place of "my"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I hope someone makes some manic bot that scrapes every last tweet and posts it on a duplicate site call Y

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Might as well go whole hog and do the entire alphabet. Then do one for every iteration of every letter combination.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Let the Supreme Court enforce it ;)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago

It should, but it won't.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Accessing the website is often viewed as accepting the terms, so that wouldn't hold up. Not that they'd have a legal standpoint on the issue.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Accessing the website is often viewed as accepting the terms

The scraping bot can't read the terms

But even if it could, it wouldn't give a damn :-)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

By reading this message you agree to my terms that I'm really cool

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Lol and you username

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

How do you read the terms without accessing their website?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

“Our interns spent 500 hours collecting the raw data”.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

deleted by creator

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You could always join wayland.social

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

Or just stop using X all together.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

Crawling for me, not thee!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just update robot.txt coward!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Took a look at their robots.txt, it appears to block all bots except Google.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

don't!

You heard him, scrape more.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

So he’s going to sue google then?