Suspended Twitter User Loses Lawsuit over Data Access–Thomas vs. Twitter

The plaintiff was representing himself, no surprise Twitters corporate lawyers won. I didn't read the judgement but I bet it was nothing that should be taken as a general or final ruling on Twitters obligations.

You’ve hit on the main problem which was them representing themselves but it feels line in case seems like it wasn’t so much twitter’s lawyers beating him as him totally failing to state anything like an actual case. The ruling is here https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...

I wonder how this squares with Twitter paying certain users for content and engagement now.

Suppose the lesson here is that in a highly unregulated market you should monetize your content so that the threat of a lawsuit holds weight against “Plaintiff’s simple act of tweeting does not create any ‘thing’ on which to base his conversion claim.”and the statement about tweets not having intrinsic value

That's why you need GDPR, with GDPR twitter would have been at fault of refusing to provide the data and the case would have been in Thomas's favor, regardless of what is writren in the TOS.