Court Rules Against Meta Data Scraping Lawsuit
One year after Meta sued a data-scraping company, a federal judge this week threw out Meta’s breach-of-contract claim because the defendant obtained only public data from Facebook and Instagram.
Meta sued Bright Data in January 2023, making claims of breach of contract and tortious interference with contract. Bright Data is an Israeli company that collects data from various websites and offers related products to businesses.
“Bright Data concedes that it was bound to Meta’s Terms while it had Facebook and Instagram accounts, and that it sells data collected from Facebook and Instagram,” US District Judge Edward Chen wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday. “However, even viewing the evidence in the light most favourable to the non-moving party (Meta)… the Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data; perforce it does not prohibit the sale of such public data. Therefore, the Terms cannot bar Bright Data’s logged-off scraping activities.”
Meta alleged that Bright Data violated Facebook and Instagram policies by developing and using “unauthorised automation software to scrape data from Facebook and Instagram, including users’ profile information, followers, and posts that users have shared with others.” The case is in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
As Chen’s ruling notes, “Bright Data moved for summary judgement on Meta’s breach of contract claim, asserting that its scraping publicly available data is not prohibited by the Meta, Facebook, or Instagram Terms.” Chen wrote that “the undisputed evidence establishes that Bright Data only engaged in logged-out scraping of public data unrelated to its accounts with Meta and thus did not breach the Terms either while it had accounts with Facebook and Instagram or after terminating its accounts.”
Chen granted Bright Data’s motion for summary judgement on the breach-of-contract claim. He also rejected Meta’s cross-motion for partial summary judgement, which argued “that Meta’s Terms created a valid and enforceable contract, and that Bright Data was bound by and breached the Terms by its scraping activities.”
Because of these rulings, “the only claim remaining against Bright Data is the claim for tortious interference with contract,” Chen wrote. Chen scheduled a status conference for March 5 to discuss litigation of the remaining claim.
Meta’s tortious interference claim alleges that Bright Data “induced” Facebook and Instagram users to breach the services’ terms by advertising the Bright Data scraping services to logged-in users.
“Defendant is aware that the customers to whom it sells its software and services have Facebook and Instagram accounts and are bound by the Facebook and Instagram Terms,” Meta alleged in its January 2023 complaint. “By offering services and tools designed to scrape data from Facebook and Instagram in violation of the Facebook and Instagram Terms, Defendant induced a breach or disruption of the Facebook and Instagram Terms by other Facebook and Instagram users.”
Bright Data’s products include a proxy network service that lets customers browse the Internet more anonymously, and a “Web Unlocker” tool that is “designed to prevent website operators like Meta from ‘us[ing] various techniques to blacklist members of the public’ from accessing public information on the Internet,” this week’s ruling said.
Bright Data also sells a Web Scraper Integrated Development Environment that is designed to help programmers conduct automated searches, and sells customised data sets based on specific search requests from customers.
Meta tries to fight scraping with a lockout mechanism that redirects users to a login screen after they view a certain amount of information, Chen noted. Meta also uses rate and data limits, CAPTCHas, and models that detect and block automated scraping.
The ruling against Meta may be of interest to Elon Musk’s X Corp., which made claims related to scraping of the platform formerly named Twitter in a lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The CCDH’s motion to dismiss X’s lawsuit is still pending in the Northern District of California federal court.
X Corp. last year also sued unidentified data scrapers, but a Dallas County District Court judge threw out the lawsuit and ordered X to pay court costs.
As Twitter continues its rebrand as X, it looks like Elon Musk hopes to quash any claims that the platform under its new name is allowing rampant hate speech to fester. Yesterday, X Corp sued a nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), for allegedly “actively working to assert false and misleading claims” regarding spiking levels of hate speech on X and successfully “encouraging advertisers to pause investment on the platform,” Twitter’s blog said.
In its complaint, X Corp. claims that CCDH’s reports have caused an estimated tens of millions in advertising revenue loss. The company said it’s aware of “at least eight” specific organisations, including large, multinational corporations, that “immediately paused their advertising spend on X based on CCDH’s reports and articles.” X also claimed that “at least five” companies “paused their plans for future advertising spend” and three companies decided not to reactivate campaigns, all allegedly basing decisions to stop spending due to CCDH’s reporting.
X is alleging that CCDH is being secretly funded by foreign governments and X competitors to lob this attack on the platform, as well as claiming that CCDH is actively working to censor opposing viewpoints on the platform. Here, X is echoing statements of US Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who accused the CCDH of being a “foreign dark money group” in 2021—following a CCDH report on 12 social media accounts responsible for 65 percent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, Fox Business reported.
“This is the same dark money group that tried to have the conservative @FDRLST deplatformed last year. And they’ve gone after other conservative sites as well, like @BreitbartNews,” Hawley said. “But who is funding this overseas dark money group—Big Tech? Billionaire activists? Foreign governments? We have no idea. Americans deserve to know what foreign interests are attempting to influence American democracy.”
The CCDH’s website says that it’s funded by “philanthropic trusts and members of the public.” A website dedicated to tracking funding sources of progressive organisations, InfluenceWatch, reported that the CCDH, which has offices in the US and the United Kingdom, has ties to the left-wing British Labour Party.
CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed claims that Musk is attempting to censor the CCDH. Ahmed said in a statement provided to Ars that “Elon Musk’s latest legal threat is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.”
“He is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticises him for his own decisions and actions,” Ahmed said.
Reuters reported that CCDH’s lawyers said X’s allegations had no legal basis and accused X of “intimidating those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech, and harmful content online.”
In a blog, X accused the CCDH of “actively working to prevent free expression” by allegedly gaining unauthorised access to X data that was then allegedly taken out of context in attempts to paint X as a platform overwhelmed by hate speech and misinformation. The CCDH’s goal, X claimed, was to silence or de-platform certain X users and deprive X of revenue.
The lawsuit was triggered by a particular report that the CCDH published in June, finding that “Twitter fails to act on 99 percent of hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers.” As media outlets reported on the CCD
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