Judge Dismisses Twitter Lawsuit Against Center for Countering Digital Hate ⇥ cnbc.com

Lora Kolodny, CNBC:

Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California wrote in his ruling that while X claimed the case was about breach of contract and unlawful data scraping, it was clearly about speech.

[…]

Musk is pursuing similar cases against other groups.

In one instance, X has sued an Israeli web data collection company called Bright Data over its allegedly unauthorized scraping of data from its social media platform. And in Texas, X sued Media Matters for America and one of its staff members over an investigative report the watchdog published titled, “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content.”

I briefly mentioned this lawsuit when it was filed in July but, as it was one of several similar cases — as noted above — I have found it difficult to keep track.

The judge’s direct response (PDF) is quite something to read. This is from page 40–41:

Here, CCDH is alleged to have used Twitter’s own search tool to collect 9,615 public tweets from ten Twitter users, […] It is not plausible that this small-scale, non-commercial scraping would prompt X Corp. to divert “dozens, if not over a hundred personnel hours across disciplines,” […] of resources toward the repair of X Corp.’s systems. […]

It is clear to the Court that if X Corp. was indeed motived to spend money in response to CCDH’s scraping in 2023, it was not because of the harm such scraping posed to the X platform, but because of the harm it posed to X Corp.’s image. […]

It goes on like this: paragraph after paragraph dismantling Twitter’s nonsense.