X Corp Loses Battle Over Public Data Access | Robinson+Cole Data Privacy + Security Insider
In a significant setback for Elon Musk’s X Corp (formerly Twitter), a U.S. District Judge has dismissed the company’s lawsuit against an Israeli data-scraping firm, Bright Data Ltd. We previously reported on X’s recent spree of lawsuits against data-scraping companies.
The court held X Corp failed to demonstrate that Bright Data violated its user agreement by enabling the scraping and sale of content from the platform. The judge asserted that using scraping tools is not inherently fraudulent and that social media companies should not have free rein to dictate how public data is used, as this could lead to “information monopolies that would disserve the public interest.”
This case is the latest win for free information advocates. In January, another San Francisco judge ruled that Bright Data did not violate Meta Platforms’ (Facebook and Instagram) terms of service by scraping data from those platforms. In March, a judge also dismissed X Corp’s lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which had published articles based on scraped data critical of the platform. This latest ruling underscores the growing recognition among the courts that social media platforms cannot unilaterally control access to public data, even if it may be inconvenient or uncomfortable for the platform owners.
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