X (formerly Twitter) has revised its terms of service to bring a major change to how its data can be used by unknown platforms. The Elon Musk-owned company has banned crawling and scraping under the new terms of service that comes into effect from September 29, 2023. This means that any unauthorised access to or use of X’s data is now prohibited, without X’s prior written consent.
“NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without our prior consent is expressly prohibited,” it read,” reads the new term.
Crawling and scraping are terms used to describe the automated collection of data from a website. Crawling is the process of finding and indexing all of the URLs on a website, while scraping is the process of extracting specific data from those URLs.
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X previously allowed crawling in compliance with robots.txt. It is a file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on X. However, it has now modified the robots.txt file to block crawlers from accessing data on likes, retweets, account activities, and media content.
The new terms of service are likely aimed at preventing third-party companies from scraping X’s data to train AI models. In recent years, there has been a growing trend of companies using AI models to analyse social media data. These models can be used to predict user behaviour, identify trends, and even generate fake news.
X under the new terms of service also wants its users to forget the word Twitter. The company insists that tweets are now posts and retweets are reposts. X is also working on to switch Twitter URLs to X URLs.
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