https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-sues-speech-tracker-twitter.html
X is suing a nonprofit group in US federal court over reports that hate speech has flourished at the platform formerly known as Twitter.
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...
It was funny laughing about Musk changing the name of Twitter to X. Seeing journalists having to actually use that ridiculous name, it isn't so funny anymore. The name is confusing and reeks of dot-com-boom edginess.
There has always been hatespeech on Twitter I don't get why people think this is the smoking gun critique
Streisand effect. If Must hadn't popped off about it, hardly anyone would know about the report.
The report is very light on comparative data. It does look cherry picked. I’d be much more interested in a real piece of research. I do see the point of CCDHs claims. But it’s pretty weak. Free speech has some uncomfortable aspects that the general populace doesn’t want to see. Blocking and filters can help tune the fire hose to your individual preferences. For example on X, I filter all the political out of my feed. It’s not that hard, people are just lazy.
Just a sanity check here...
X née Twitter is suing a non-profit for trying to cancel it...on a platform that they literally own.