The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now.
The irony of Elon mentioning “outrageous valuations” though!
I'd expect those that require real time data, such as stock market bots or sentiment data providers, to scrape twitter (if they don't provide the data by other means, for example the "firehose", which is another great way to earn money).
None of this makes much sense.
Also, it's much more complicated than it seems. The web works because the data is public. You cannot think of it as "my data". (Especially not twitter, since it is really their users'!) Twitter is not higher quality data than any other web page.
If we accept that thinking, every home page would require a login to see that specific company's phone number of opening hours. Those pieces of data are also valuable, in the right circumstances! And then the web would either not exist or the account system required would be so wide spread that accounts would carry no value and the system would become useless.
What do you think the webs value was imagined to be in the “80s”?
There was no web in the 80s so not sure what values you refer to, or how they are relevant to today's businesses.
Of course, none of those people own Twitter, and it may well be more valuable to its owners if it does require a login.
I can think of a few possible reasons. They might want more up-to-date info, or they might have no real developers and the scraper was created by a business guru who prompted ChatGPT and didn't understand the code that came out.
Given what else Musk has asserted about Twitter, and how often former or current Twitter devs have contradicted him, it may not even be what Musk said.
> Twitter is not higher quality data than any other web page
Eh, depends how much you can infer from retweet, favourites, etc.
Won't be the only such site, but it's probably better training data than blog posts are these days.
But yeah, I absolutely agree that Twitter doing this caused a lot of damage to any orgs, corporate or government, which wanted to be public, anything from restaurants announcing special offers to governments issuing hurricane warnings. Twitter isn't big enough to assume everyone has an account, like Facebook is.
This is just kicking the can down the road.
We have a major structural problem now. We want data to be free and machine readable, but no startup (and even a giant like Twitter) can afford the server cost to withstand all those machines.
But then so is Twitter. They don’t produce any content whatsoever. The data they are having a fit about is not theirs, it’s been volunteered by the users. It’s the same line Reddit is pushing, and it’s bullshit. AI companies scraping the web is no more unethical than Google doing it.
Taking/scrapping/stealing that data out of said platform for the benefit of your over-hyped “disruptive” startup - and implying that others should give you all for free - is the issue.
Scraping data from a public website is not "stealing". It might be a violation of the terms of service, but then you have the whole issue of click-through (formerly shrink-wrap) licenses and contracts of adhesion.
If someone isn't vetting you and potentially signing you to a more meaningful contract before giving you access, for free, to data, then using that data for any purpose whatsoever (except republishing it or derived works, which might, depending on the nature of the data or the derived works, be a violation of someone's copyright) is so far from "stealing" that using that word is wrong, and I suspect intentionally inflammatory.
That's why Elon limited access, rather than going to the police to file charges for theft, or suing over copyright violation or breach of contract. Not to say he absolutely couldn't do the latter, but it's hardly a clear win.
1. Users or one might say content creators don't own their data. Not just do those platform owners make a lot of money with the content (which they have a license to, as per site ToS) but then you have third parties scraping it now for commercial products. Using the data to train models that are then sold back to some of the same social media users who produced the content for free in the first place wasn't a thing until very recently, it used to be a select few doing machine learning research in the past. The laws are lacking behind the tech development and regular internet users are being exploited because of it.
2. It absolutely is stealing in some cases, and even worse. For example when they scrape it for content which they then use to train their bots to impersonate humans. Or on Twitter, there's a very common type of bot that steals content from young attractive female social media users in China, auto-translated to English, to pose as them. If you're in finance and crypto circles they're swarming with these accounts (guess the scammers know their targets).
3. In general this is only going to get worse from here on. LLM are getting better and better. On sites like Twitter you already have no idea if you're interacting with a human or not. But these "AI" can not actually think for themselves, they can only emulate, they can copy other humans. At least so far. So for the sake of making progress and ensuring we can still have intelligent discussions and find novel ideas online, it's imperative to have a way to keep the machines out. Social media must become sybil resistant or it dies in a vicious circle of self-referencing bots ever parroting the same old talking points, or variations thereof. We urgently need human ID!
Nobody is deprived of their property, intellectual or otherwise, when this stuff happens, thus is it not right to call it stealing.
Governments, researchers, and all kinds of third parties have already been scraping every publicly available bit of data possible. There may be an increase now, but it's nothing new. It won't be the end of the society or the end of the internet anymore than AI will.
>have already been scraping every publicly available bit of data possible
Data scraping is limited by economics just like anything else in the world. Storage costs money, someone has to pay for it. Researchers do not have unlimited funds. Some select few governments like the US may have most of the publicly accessible web archived. Keep in mind it's dynamic and requires massive data infrastructure to pull this off, there's tons of new data coming in daily. Private startups getting in on the action in a big way is a relatively new phenomenon, this used to be limited to enterprises with a specific purpose. Now everyone and their 4chan cousin are experimenting with their own deep learning models.
Bots aren't people and can't read nor consent. They just consume.
Any page which can be served without first displaying a ToC or other terms which explicitly prohibit access is not protected by a ToC or other license from scraping, as they can be considered a Point of First Contact in each case, as the bot has selected each link from a simple aggregation of all links it encounters (each interaction being "new" in essence).
Now it could be argued that ignoring robots.txt is an explicit contravention of norms and standards which could be viewed as a violation of an implicit licence, but there is no law requiring adherence to robots.txt and thus no mandate that a program even look for it iiuc.
Even more applicable, this is like saying that a person walking down the street can't have a camera and take a picture of the front of the building....
Because the page you land on when entering a url is in fact little different than a store front, with the associated signage and access points defining how a person or automated device may interact with that business.
If you want to have it different then you have to actually put everything behind a locked door with no window, right?
I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.
However if you mean implementing some even worse obfuscation (kind of like FB putting parts of words in different divs etc) that is not really compatible with the situation that this needed to be done as more of a temporary emergency measure. And PoW doesn't sound reasonable because it sets mobile devices against the scraper's servers. If all of this was just so easy, scraping would be dead. Good that it isn't.
Scraper servers and mobile devices have different access patterns though. I I'm reading tweets then I'm fine waiting 1 second for a tweet to load. Page load times for this kind of bloated stuff are super slow anyway, meanwhile my mobile could spend a second or two on some PoW. But if you want to large-scale scrape, you suddenly have to pay for 1bn CPU seconds. And this PoW could even keep continuously increasing per IP. 0.1% with every tweet. Not noticeablr for the casual surfer sitting on the toilet, neck-breaking for scrapers.
> If all of this was just so easy, scraping would be dead. Good that it isn't.
Small-scale scraping could still be provided through API access or just a login.
The reason they are not doing the "easy" thing is that they don't see a need (yet, perhaps). Just get an account, they'd say, and they are right. It works for Instagram too, except for some weirdos who nobody really cares about.
>The reason they are not doing the "easy" thing is that they don't see a need (yet, perhaps).
This argument just doesn't make any sense. Twitter notes that this is hurting them. Previews in chat apps, just clicking links in non-loggedin contexts is are broken. I feel like you just predict that this will turn out to be more accepted in the near future and become more a more permanent decision, which you don't like.
Most baffling is mobile reddit, where it takes like 6 seconds to load. Do they want us to use their crappy app, or they just dont care?
For non-auth use, I rather wait for 1 second than not have any access at all. Which is the current state of affairs.
Also a side note: distributed Web crawler is not unheard of these days, as well as residential IP proxies. Meaning the effectiveness of Proof of Work model maybe also limited.
These systems tend to treat residential proxies as normal users, and puts less restrictions on them. On the other hand, if the IP address belongs to some (untrusted) IDCs, then the system will enable more annoying restrictions (say rate limits etc) against it, making scraping less efficient.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely throttling scrapers (at least ones that are not nefarious in their habits) is a problem that can be mitigated server-side, so I find it somewhat galling that its the excuse.
No matter what you do, this will cost server infra. That's Musk's argument for disabling access altogether.
Therefore it would make sense to have a solution which burdens the client disproportionately in relation to the server. A burden so low for the casual user that it's negligible but in aggregate, at scale, would break things. Which is what he wants.
Looks to me like both reddit and twitter are using the wedge to rather increase the height of the wall of their gardens and kill 3rd party development as opposed to genuinely trying to license bulk-users appropriately.
You're gonna need to license api keys so you're already identifying consumers and there's your infra which you need anyway. At which point you can throttle anyone obviously abusing whatever free/open-source tier offering you give out as standard.
This works far better when the items requested are small in number but large in volume (that is: a large number of requests against a small set of origin resources). When dealing with widespread and deep scraping, other strategies might be necessary, but these aren't impossible to envision.
Specifically permitted scraping interfaces or APIs for large-volume data access would be another option.
Of course, there's the associated issue that data aggregation itself conveys insights and power, and there might be concerns amongst those who think they're providing incidental and low-volume access to records discovering that there's a wholesale trade occurring in the background (whether that's remunerated or free of charge).
Actually I’m surprised this took so long to do, and in the light of doing so shows that perhaps Twitter was sold for its existing content rather than existing or active user base.
Not a very significant distinction: if active users stopped posting, scrappers wouldn't have much of a reason to keep scrapping.
Age may be included as part of the training but they generally want to suck up as much data as possible.
It's shared ownership. You own it, but give Twitter non-exclusive permission to also use it.
This is why news agencies request permission from a twitter account before sharing a picture they took.
I can own a picture, but I can't place it on the NY Times website.
It may seem weird weird to compare useful content to a used napkin, but hey, successful business founder stereotypes do quite often involve have an idea written on a napkin…
Yes, it’s a mistake to rely on social media content remaining up forever, agreed. That’s separate from ownership. Backups are important even for data on a hard drive you physically own, since hard drives can fail or be damaged or lost.
Also, Twitter is a public platform. Twitter didn't generate comments, and people posting on a public account are indirectly subject to public viewing. Not much different from being indirectly recorded in a public park
The Twitters and Reddits need to be careful here when complaining because without users generating free content, they also have no business.
There's one major player making money off of other peoples content here, and that's Twitter. Why are they ok doing that, but not anyone else?
I recall that email at one point was 90% spam.
Including you and me. WE built part of the infrastructure.
Many people who aren’t that privacy conscious would however object to lots of companies, big and small, sucking their content into their databases for their own uses, then republishing after it’s passed through a few AI models.
I think this points out that AIs clearly do not work like human brains. Human brains do not need all of the content of humanity to produce a replica of art station mediocre.
Do they have a choice? A handful of corporations have captured all the network effects. If you need to reach an audience to do your job or find your "friends", what other choice do you have but to give your data to them?
If they aren't close why do you care?
Alternatively, what would make more sense is to participate in communities gated by these networks but then it's your choice to be there.
I don't personally have this problem, but my observation is that most social relationships are somewhere in between closest friends and don't care.
My own concern is more about participating in professional, neighbourhood, civil society or political communities. Choosing not to be where they have decided to congregate means not being able to do my job and not making my voice heard where many decisions affecting me are taken.