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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too familiar with the Twitter terms of service, but I would be surprised if selling access to their data wasn't a clear violation.

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Well they're not selling access to data, the data is freely available. They're selling a service that packages that data for you.

Data which probably was obtained through the API which from my interpretation of https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-a... is not permitted.

If obtained through scraping vs the API it also isn't allowed via the regular ToS https://twitter.com/en/tos and their robots.txt

So either way sounds like a ToS violation. Which Twitter is usually pretty aggressive about shutting down.

I can’t see how this is true as there are tons of companies selling access to data obtained from the Twitter API such as social media monitoring companies (Sprinklr, Meltwater)

Those companies have business development deals in place with Twitter that authorize them to do this.

There are plenty of other non-enterprisey companies that sell Twitter data as well*

*I was a founder of one of them.

Interesting. Do you have any advice on how I can try this again without getting suspended?

If you are creating a Twitter app, and letting users login via Twitter and then using those user tokens to make API calls, that’s a good first step, I am not sure if you are doing this already.

Other than that, I would just make sure you position your service as something that benefits Twitter, describe it as something that allows you to create better tweets or engage with your followers better. The internet is filled with apps that sell Twitter data like Mention.com, SocialRank, and Social Animal.

Thank you this is really useful info. I am indeed doing as you say, and I think you're right it's the positioning that has got the app in trouble.

That's true in a sense. But I would still be paying them money to receive data from Twitter. So in a sense, yes, I am paying for Twitter data. In any case, I have a hard time seeing how this wouldn't violate the ToS.

As a counterpoint, stock data is freely available (through online websites, your broker/app, etc), yet it costs thousands of dollars per month to actually license and acquire such data through the proper channels. Trying to build a business based on scraping such data (or even using your broker's free personal-use API) will get you in trouble pretty quick by the exchanges.

You can’t package and redistribute tweets only tweet ids.

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