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If you're making a twitter clone (as Substack is) then scraping the twitter follower graph seems useful. And that's public, obviously.

> seems useful

How so?

Help users port over their own social graphs, and assist recommendations.

Substack’s CEO has denied any improper use of the Twitter APIs. Given Elon’s long and storied history of making things up, this allegation seems likely to be another fabulation.

Well, is scraping Twitter an improper use? Anyone can see tweets and who follows who - that's public. Twitter might consider a nascent competitor trying to scrape a significant fraction of the whole thing unfriendly though.

Probably using the oauth tokens they get from substack users that connect their twitter to spider and download the API. Cambridge Analytica-style.

It's obviously referring to scraping.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/LinkedIn-Wins-Latest-C...