Twitter suing Bright Data, demands it stops scraping
X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, is claiming that the Israeli company “scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.’s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.’s terms of service”
X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, is suing Israeli startup Bright Data, claiming that the company extracted and sold records of millions of the social media platform’s users in violation of the terms of service.
Bright Data specializes in business intelligence based on collecting and processing publicly available information on the web. The company's work procedure includes the massive collection of information from personal profiles on social networks - a practice known as scraping. This activity has already embroiled the company with another social media giant, Meta, which filed a similar lawsuit against it in February.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claimed that “Bright Data scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.’s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.’s terms of service.
“Bright Data also induces and facilitates other X users to violate their own agreements with X Corp. by selling automated data-scraping tools and services that specifically target a wide range of X Corp. data.”
The lawsuit was filed after the controlling owner of Twitter/X, Elon Musk, came out publicly against massive data scraping on the platform by various entities. About three weeks ago, Musk surprisingly limited the number of tweets that an ordinary user can see per day to 600 (later slightly loosened), claiming that this was done to curb information scraping efforts on the site. About two weeks ago, the company filed a separate lawsuit in Texas against anonymous entities that also scraped information on the platform, alleging that they were causing a "heavy load" on its servers.
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CEO of Bright Data, Or Lenchner, told website MediaPost in response that the lawsuit “is an effort to build a wall around publicly available data on Twitter.”
Lenchner added that “Bright Data is transparent in its public web data collection practices and is fully compliant with the law. We are committed to making public data broadly available to everyone to benefit society and will vigorously defend our position in court to ensure the Internet remains accessible to all.”
