X is suing a nonprofit group in US federal court over reports that hate speech has flourished at the platform formerly known as Twitter
X is suing a nonprofit group in US federal court over reports that hate speech has flourished at the platform formerly known as Twitter.
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So the thing is the case has four parts, three out of four are basically (and I quote from the filing):
[X/Twitter] not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression.
Which pretty much the vast majority of the filing is this. Which is basically"Nuh-uh YOUR mama so fat!" So yeah, it's going to go nowhere. The inducing folks to break contract, etc. Yeah, there's next to nothing there. CCDH has tweets showing the very things they indicated and it's a semantic argument on what "flourished" may or may not mean to a hypothetical person who wants to buy ads on your network. Basically if you've got demonstrable garbage on your network, don't be surprised if someone points it out.
The fourth part does touch on something to which we don't have clear guidance on. And that is how CCDH accessed the site to obtain the data. Scraping a website is mostly free, unless you're doing it for the explicit purpose of profiting. However, CCDH is a non-profit so this is going to be an uphill thing for Musk.
Except in the case where the court decides to toss a curve-ball. See, the various US courts don't have any actual legal framework to work from for web scraping. Congress keeps kicking the can on the issue. And that's the thing that's got CCDH awake at night, a Judge literally can just invent their own rationale on why scraping is wrong or a protected right. It could literally go either way given a wild enough judge.
Anyway, the entire point is that no one should be using X or Twitter or whatever the fuck it is now.
I was about to say that a right to scraping public data was established by HiQ vs LinkedIn, but I looked up the details and apparently SCOTUS overturned that decision and sent it back to the circuits, so yeah it does still seem to be a gray area...