#scrape Facebook Advertising Data

[fabaulti]

I think most of us should take the whole ai scraping situation as a sign that we should maybe stop giving google/facebook/big corps all our data and look into alternatives that actually value your privacy.

i know this is easier said than done because everybody under the sun seems to use these services, but I promise you it’s not impossible. In fact, I made a list of a few alternatives to popular apps and services, alternatives that are privacy first, open source and don’t sell your data.

right off the bat I suggest you stop using gmail. it’s trash and not secure at all. google can read your emails. in fact, google has acces to all the data on your account and while what they do with it is already shady, I don’t even want to know what the whole ai situation is going to bring. a good alternative to a few google services is skiff. they provide a secure, e3ee mail service along with a workspace that can easily import google documents, a calendar and 10 gb free storage. i’ve been using it for a while and it’s great.

a good alternative to google drive is either koofr or filen. I use filen because everything you upload on there is end to end encrypted with zero knowledge. they offer 10 gb of free storage and really affordable lifetime plans.

google docs? i don’t know her. instead, try cryptpad. I don’t have the spoons to list all the great features of this service, you just have to believe me. nothing you write there will be used to train ai and you can share it just as easily. if skiff is too limited for you and you also need stuff like sheets or forms, cryptpad is here for you. the only downside i could think of is that they don’t have a mobile app, but the site works great in a browser too.

since there is no real alternative to youtube I recommend watching your little slime videos through a streaming frontend like freetube or new pipe. besides the fact that they remove ads, they also stop google from tracking what you watch. there is a bit of functionality loss with these services, but if you just want to watch videos privately they’re great.

if you’re looking for an alternative to google photos that is secure and end to end encrypted you might want to look into stingle, although in my experience filen’s photos tab works pretty well too.

oh, also, for the love of god, stop using whatsapp, facebook messenger or instagram for messaging. just stop. signal and telegram are literally here and they’re free. spread the word, educate your friends, ask them if they really want anyone to snoop around their private conversations.

regarding browser, you know the drill. throw google chrome/edge in the trash (they really basically spyware disguised as browsers) and download either librewolf or brave. mozilla can be a great secure option too, with a bit of tinkering.

if you wanna get a vpn (and I recommend you do) be wary that some of them are scammy. do your research, read their terms and conditions, familiarise yourself with their model. if you don’t wanna do that and are willing to trust my word, go with mullvad. they don’t keep any logs. it’s 5 euros a month with no different pricing plans or other bullshit.

lastly, whatever alternative you decide on, what matters most is that you don’t keep all your data in one place. don’t trust a service to take care of your emails, documents, photos and messages. store all these things in different, trustworthy (preferably open source) places. there is absolutely no reason google has to know everything about you.

do your own research as well, don’t just trust the first vpn service your favourite youtube gets sponsored by. don’t trust random tech blogs to tell you what the best cloud storage service is — they get good money for advertising one or the other. compare shit on your own or ask a tech savvy friend to help you. you’ve got this.

[violainebriat]

It's a bit weird typing out a full post here on tumblr. I used to be one of these artists that mostly focused on posting only images, the least amount of opinions/thoughts I could share, the better. Today, the art world online feels weird, not only because of AI, but also the algorithms on every platform and the general way our craft is getting replaced for close to 0 dollars. This website was a huge instrument in kickstarting my career as a professional artist, it was an inspiring place were artists shared their art and where we could make friends with anyone in the world, in any industries. It was pretty much the place that paved the way as a social media website outside of Facebook, where you could search art through tags etc. Anyhow, Tumblr still has a place in my heart even if all artists moved away from it after the infamous nsfw ban (mostly to Instagram and twitter). And now we're all playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to figure out if the social media platform we're using is going to sell their user content to AI / deep learning (looking at you reddit, going into stocks). On the Tumblr side, Matt Mullenweg's interviews and thoughts on the platform shows he's down to use AI, and I guess it could help create posts faster but then again, you have to click through multiple menus to protect your art (and writing) from being scraped. It's really kind of sad to have to be on the defensive with posting art/writing online. It doesn't even reflect my personal philosophy on sharing content. I've always been a bit of a "punk" thinking if people want to bootleg my work, it's like free advertisement and a testament to people liking what I created, so I've never really watermarked anything and posted fairly high-res version of my work. I don't even think my art is big enough to warrant the defensiveness of glazing/nightshading it, but the thought of it going through a program to be grinded into a data mush to be only excreted out as the ghost of its former self is honestly sort of deadening.

Finally, the most defeating trend is the quantity of nonsense and low-quality content that's being fed to the internet, made a million times easier with the use of AI. I truly feel like we're living what Neil Postman saw happening over 40 years ago in "amusing ourselves to death"(the brightness of this man's mind is still unrivaled in my eyes).

I guess this is my big rant to tell y'all now I'm gonna be posting crunchy art because Nightshade and Glaze basically make your crispy art look like a low-res JPEG, and I feel like an idiot for doing it but I'm considering it an act of low effort resistance against data scraping. If I can help "poison" data scrapping by wasting 5 minutes of my life to spit out a crunchy jpeg before posting, listen, it's not such a bad price to pay. Anyhow check out my new sticker coming to my secret shop really soon, and how he looks before and after getting glazed haha....

[arrghigiveup]

How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat

-Christie Wilcox

Reposting whole text cos paywall:

Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential. According to Google Scholar, he’d authored a dozen papers on topics ranging from complex algebras to the structure of mathematical objects, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And Larry wasn’t a cat.

“It was an exercise in absurdity,” says Reese Richardson, a graduate student in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University. Earlier this month, he and fellow research misconduct sleuth Nick Wise at the University of Cambridge cooked up Larry’s profile and engineered the feline’s scientific ascent. Their goal: to make him the world’s most highly cited cat by mimicking a tactic apparently employed by a citation-boosting service advertised on Facebook. In just 2 short weeks, the duo accomplished its mission.

The stunt will hopefully draw awareness to the growing issue of the manipulation of research metrics, says Peter Lange, a higher education consultant and emeritus professor of political science at Duke University. “I think most faculty members at the institutions I know are not even aware of such citation mills.”

As a general rule, the more a scientific paper is cited by other studies, the more important it and its authors are in a field. One shorthand is the popular “h-index”: An h-index of 10 means a person has 10 papers with at least 10 citations each, for instance.

Inflating a researcher’s citation count and h-index gives them “a tremendous advantage” in hiring and tenure decisions says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney. It also drives the business model of shady organizations that promise to boost your citations in exchange for cash. “If you can just buy citations,” Byrne says, “you’re buying influence.”

Enter Larry the cat. His tale began a few weeks ago, when Wise saw a Facebook ad offering “citation & h-index boosting.” It wasn’t the first promo he and Richardson had seen for such services. (The going rate seems to be about $10 per citation.) But this one linked to screenshots of Google Scholar profiles of real scientists. That meant the duo could see just which citations were driving up the numbers.

The citations, it turned out, often belonged to papers full of nonsense text authored by long-dead mathematicians such as Pythagoras. The studies had been uploaded as PDFs to the academic social platform ResearchGate and then subsequently deleted, obscuring their nature. (Wise and Richardson had to dig into Google’s cache to read the documents.) “We were like, ‘Wow, this procedure is incredibly easy,’” Richardson recalls. “All you have to do is put some fake papers on ResearchGate.”

It’s so easy, Wise noted at the time, that a quickly written script to pump out plausible-sounding papers could make anyone highly cited—even a cat. “I don’t know if he was being serious,” Richardson says. “But I certainly took that as a challenge.” And he knew just the cat to beat: F.D.C. Willard. In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to “we” would make more sense. As of this year, “Felis Domesticus Chester Willard” has 107 citations.

To break that record, Richardson turned to his grandmother’s cat Larry. In about an hour he created 12 fake papers authored by Larry and 12 others that cited each of Larry’s works. That would amount to 12 papers with 12 citations each, for a total citation count of 144 and an h-index of 12. Richardson uploaded the manuscripts to a ResearchGate profile he created for the feline. Then, he and Wise waited for Google Scholar to automatically scrape the fake data.

On 17 July, Larry’s papers and 132 citations appeared on the site. (Google Scholar failed to catch one spurious study, Wise notes.) And, thus, Larry became the world’s most highly cited cat. “I asked Larry what his reaction was over the phone,” Richardson told Science. “I can only assume he was too stunned to speak.”

Although Larry’s profile might seem obviously fake, finding manipulated ones usually isn’t easy, says Talal Rahwan, a computer scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi. Earlier this year, he and Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at the same institution, and their colleagues scanned more than 1 million Google Scholar profiles to look for anomalous citation counts. They found at least 114 with “highly irregular citation patterns,” according to a paper posted in February on the arXiv preprint server. “The vast majority had at least some of their dubious citations from ResearchGate,” Zaki says.

ResearchGate is “of course aware of the growing research integrity issues in the global research community,” says the company’s CEO, Ijad Madisch. “[We] are continually reviewing our policies and processes to ensure the best experience for our millions of researcher users.” In this case, he says, the company was unaware that citation mills delete content after indexing, apparently to cover their tracks—intel that may help ResearchGate develop better monitoring systems. “We appreciate Science reporting this particular situation to us and we will be using this report to review and adapt our processes as required.”

Google Scholar removed Larry’s citations about 1 week after they appeared, so he has lost his unofficial title. However, his profile still exists, and the dubious citations in the profiles that were in the advertisement remain. So, “They haven’t fixed the problem,” Wise says. Google Scholar did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not the first time somebody has manipulated Google Scholar by posting fake papers. In 2010, Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at Grenoble Alpes University, invented a researcher named Ike Antkare (“I can’t care”), and made him the sixth most cited computer scientist on the service by posting fake publications to Labbé institutional website. “Impersonating a fake scientist in a cat is very cute,” Labbé says. “If it can be done for a cat, it can easily be done for a real person.”

For that reason, many researchers would like to see less emphasis on h-index and other metrics that have “the undue glow of quantification,” as Lange puts it. As long as the benefits of manipulating these systems outweigh the risks and costs, Wise says, people are going to continue to try to hack them. “How can you create a metric that can’t be gamed? I’m sure the answer is: You can’t.”

[facelessoldgargoyle]

I’m at a business meeting at the Quaker meetinghouse I attend and we’re talking about updating social media and this seventy year old pipes up to say that Facebook scrapes your data and sells it to advertisers

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

If you have s PayPal, X premium, or any other services, or have bought a Tesla you've already given over this info long ago. Google literally has more data on Americans buy a metric landslide worth then Doge has on the American people. And it's idiots like this who do not understand anything even remotely similar to that.

Facebook has been scraping your data for ages including all of your DMs. Google has been collecting information on you and then selling that information to advertisers who can then use those metrics to provide you more targeted ads. They also own Google docs which they also scrape. If you think doge is able to just take and download all of your information and keep it in some private billionaire layer under a volcano you are an absolute moron.

[abivanceconnect]

Social Media and Privacy Concerns!!! What You Need to Know???

In a world that is becoming more digital by the day, social media has also become part of our day-to-day lives. From the beginning of sharing personal updates to networking with professionals, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have changed the way we communicate. However, concerns over privacy have also grown, where users are wondering what happens to their personal information. If you use social media often, it is important to be aware of these privacy risks. In this article, we will outline the main issues and the steps you need to take to protect your online data privacy. (Related: Top 10 Pros and Cons of Social media)

1. How Social Media Platforms Scrape Your Data The majority of social media platforms scrape plenty of user information, including your: ✅ Name, email address, and phone number ✅ Location and web browsing history ✅ Likes, comments, and search history-derived interests. Although this enhances the user experience as well as advertising, it has serious privacy issues. (Read more about social media pros and cons here) 2. Risks of Excessive Sharing Personal Information Many users unknowingly expose themselves to security risks through excessive sharing of personal information. Posting details of your daily routine, location, or personal life can lead to: ⚠️ Identity theft ⚠️Stalking and harassment ⚠️ Cyber fraud

This is why you need to alter your privacy settings and be careful about what you post on the internet. (Read this article to understand how social media affects users.) 3. The Role of Third-Party Apps in Data Breaches Did you register for a site with Google or Facebook? Handy, maybe, but in doing so, you're granting apps access to look at your data, normally more than is necessary. Some high profile privacy scandals, the Cambridge Analytica one being an example, have shown how social media information can be leveraged for in politics and advertising. To minimize danger: 👍Regularly check app permissions 👍Don't sign up multiple accounts where you don't need to 👍Strong passwords and two-factor authentication To get an in-depth overview of social media's impact on security, read this detailed guide. 4. How Social Media Algorithms Follow You You may not realize this, but social media algorithms are tracking you everywhere. From the likes you share to the amount of time you watch a video, sites monitor it all through AI-driven algorithms that learn from behavior and build personalized feeds. Though it can drive user engagement, it also: ⚠️ Forms filter bubbles that limit different perspectives ⚠️ Increases data exposure in case of hacks ⚠️ Increases ethical concerns around online surveillance Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of social media will help you make an informed decision. (Find out more about it here) 5. Maintaining Your Privacy: Real-Life Tips

To protect your personal data on social media: ✅ Update privacy settings to limit sharing of data ✅ Be cautious when accepting friend requests from unknown people ✅ Think before you post—consider anything shared online can be seen by others ✅ Use encrypted messaging apps for sensitive conversations These small habits can take you a long way in protecting your online existence. (For more detailed information, read this article) Final Thoughts Social media is a powerful tool that connects people, companies, and communities. There are privacy concerns, though, and you need to be clever about how your data is being utilized. Being careful about what you share, adjusting privacy settings, and using security best practices can enable you to enjoy the benefits of social media while being safe online. Interested in learning more about how social media influences us? Check out our detailed article on the advantages and disadvantages of social media and the measures to be taken to stay safe on social media.

[gdredd]

Since insta wouldn't let me post it:

I try (very very hard) to not get political here.

But, given the fact that roller derby relies very heavily this app to communicate, i felt like it was important to speak my mind:

Tomorrow, at some time, the app TikTok will be banned in the US. This bill, however, not only bans that app but potentially any non-US app that the powers that be deemed harmful. It is likely that the incoming president will save it to look like the hero. Regardless, this bill is a travesty.

For those who don't know, I am an airborne Army Veteran. I swore an oath to protect the constitution only for it to be trampled over for corporate and political greed.

We, as a people, do not have a lot of options to stop the coming censorship and political overreach that is going to happen in the next couple years.

However, we can effect the one the care about and the reason for these bans in the first place:

Money.

What You Can Do:

Delete Facebook off your phone[Yes,really].

Due to the way digital privacy laws work -and how behind our laws are about the subject- most of the data the companies that lobbied for this get is from mobile data scraping.

There is a lot of technical behind the scenes stuff that is complicated. But TDLR; the majority of their money comes from your data and they get that data via your phone.

Talk to your Derby teams about moving internal communication OFF M_ta Apps.

As a smaller, queer inclusive community, we do not have the luxury of kicking these apps completely. Our community lives and dies off social media engagement.

But! We can have our Teams communicate through things like band, tapatalk, etc.

Given the ways things are going, our community especially needs a way to communicate in ways that are not “standard” as we as Queer, Bipoc, and Neurodivergent inclusive people will be censored first.

Treat These Apps the Same Way Treat Us: A Business.

Due to Big Tech Monopolies these companies hold, it is impractical to expect us to -on mass level- these apps. However, we can stop giving them what they want: advertiser clicks and money.

Treat these apps like your team, art, or business launch page. Encourage your followers and friends to follow you in other places, and conduct your actual social internet life there.

Decentralize You Media Use, Connect with Your Local Community, and Buy Local.

Now more than ever, it is important to be present in the physical space. We will need each other more than ever. We will need to RELY on each other more than ever. Download things like next door or just go knock on your neighbors door with a gift and a smile.

Join your local knitting,gaming, whatever circle and get involved.It’s time to connect IRL. And I say that as a person who is borderline an Otaku.

Final Notes:

None of this is easy. It requires a radical shift in thinking and behavior. I know. But it's time.

As for me, I will be using Facebook and Insta as I described above: business pages. If you want to see me be more authentic, follow the link tree in my bio.

If you think I’m just being dramatic, please keep in mind: My field of study is Cyber Security and I am a huge Cold War and WW2 history buff. The writing is on the wall and I’d rather be wrong than ill prepared.

Finally: Breath. It’s scary, it sucks, but our ancestors have been here before. We come from a line of resistance and Joy despite struggle. We will be ok.

P.S. Get a library card. Seriously.

[tribow]

I don't get the discourse around supporting Tumblr.

Like if you give money to Tumblr you are supporting all of their bad decisions!!!

Okay, but then how do they keep the site alive? Ads? How many people are clicking on ads here? Tumblr hasn't been scraping every tiny piece of data they can get to sell it like Facebook does either. Should they start doing that? Or should they sell more ad space even though they're already known to be a site that isn't all the great for advertisers.

This is the only two routes I can think of for attempting to stay sustainable without the use of getting money directly from their users.

Someone's gotta pay to maintain this site and also pay all employees working to do so. This isn't a one man job you need a whole team for this. Tumblr costs quite a bit to maintain.

Is it wrong to pay for an online service you frequently use? I mean, let's imagine every Tumblr user magically unite to protest against all the changes to Tumblr they disagree with by making sure Tumblr gets no financial support. What would happen? Who is paying Tumblr's staff to listen to the demands of its community? Does anyone know how long that could take? Would that really save the site or would that send it straight to its doom?

To change topic a bit. Is financially supporting a company indicative of you agreeing with what they are doing? Is it not entirely possoble to critique a company in spite of your support? There's still things like review bombing and disrupting customer service. Besides, without being a paying customer you wouldn't have much of anything to threaten Tumblr with. If majority of the userbased was supporting with money it would be very scary for Tumblr if a ton of people really pulled out.

I....

I don't know it just seems to me that people want to protest to Tumblr staff by just....doing nothing and continueing to use Tumblr. What does that do??? Do YOU want to become the product??? Tumblr could axe Tumblr Live right now all of those people complaining wouldn't give Tumblr a dime for it. These devs are fairly communicative. They have several blogs dedicated to development, there's devs with their own blogs who respond to the community and even post surveys for suggestions to other staff, they did a Q&A in Tumblr Live (annoyingly), and have been fairly transparent in clearly communicating their plans while keeping it very open to criticism.

I can't really say that about many other companies. Tumblr staff gives its users SO MANY avenues to communicate. It's almost too open. The staff can get harassed very easily (I'm sure some do). Are the people complaining about this site not using these avenues to get staff's attention? I don't see how not giving them money will get their attention. If anything it would make them more desparate to get money from us through other means than something as inoffensive as merch.

This is a website that you are using. Is it wrong to compensate those maintaining/providing this service as you use it? If it is wrong, then what are the alternatives? Am I just stupid am I missing something?

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: AI and advertising

Bubble Trouble (about AIs trained on AI output and the impending model collapse) (Ed Zitron, Mar 2024)

A Wall Street Journal piece from this week has sounded the alarm that some believe AI models will run out of "high-quality text-based data" within the next two years in what an AI researcher called "a frontier research problem."  Modern AI models are trained by feeding them "publicly-available" text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct. Theoretically, the more training data that these models receive, the more accurate their responses will be, or at least that's what the major AI companies would have you believe. Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI's next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4. In layman's terms, these machines require tons of information to discern what the "right" answer to a prompt is, and "rightness" can only be derived from seeing lots of examples of what "right" looks like. ... One (very) funny idea posed by the Journal's piece is that AI companies are creating their own "synthetic" data to train their models, a "computer-science version of inbreeding" that Jathan Sadowski calls Habsburg AI.  This is, of course, a terrible idea. A research paper from last year found that feeding model-generated data to models creates "model collapse" — a "degenerative learning process where models start forgetting improbable events over time as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality."

...

The AI boom has driven global stock markets to their best first quarter in 5 years, yet I fear that said boom is driven by a terrifyingly specious and unstable hype cycle. The companies benefitting from AI aren't the ones integrating it or even selling it, but those powering the means to use it — and while "demand" is allegedly up for cloud-based AI services, every major cloud provider is building out massive data center efforts to capture further demand for a technology yet to prove its necessity, all while saying that AI isn't actually contributing much revenue at all. Amazon is spending nearly $150 billion in the next 15 years on data centers to, and I quote Bloomberg, "handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications" as it tells its salespeople to temper their expectations of what AI can actually do.  I feel like a crazy person every time I read glossy pieces about AI "shaking up" industries only for the substance of the story to be "we use a coding copilot and our HR team uses it to generate emails." I feel like I'm going insane when I read about the billions of dollars being sunk into data centers, or another headline about how AI will change everything that is mostly made up of the reporter guessing what it could do.

They're Looting the Internet (Ed Zitron, Apr 2024)

An investigation from late last year found that a third of advertisements on Facebook Marketplace in the UK were scams, and earlier in the year UK financial services authorities said it had banned more than 10,000 illegal investment ads across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok in 2022 — a 1,500% increase over the previous year. Last week, Meta revealed that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period . Even the giants haven’t resisted the temptation to screw their users. CNN, one of the most influential news publications in the world, hosts both its own journalism and spammy content from "chum box" companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars driving clicks to everything from scams to outright disinformation. And you'll find them on CNN, NBC and other major news outlets, which by proxy endorse stories like "2 Steps To Tell When A Slot Is Close To Hitting The Jackpot."  These “chum box” companies are ubiquitous because they pay well, making them an attractive proposition for cash-strapped media entities that have seen their fortunes decline as print revenues evaporated. But they’re just so incredibly awful. In 2018, the (late, great) podcast Reply All had an episode that centered around a widower whose wife’s death had been hijacked by one of these chum box advertisers to push content that, using stolen family photos, heavily implied she had been unfaithful to him. The title of the episode — An Ad for the Worst Day of your Life — was fitting, and it was only until a massively popular podcast intervened did these networks ban the advert.  These networks are harmful to the user experience, and they’re arguably harmful to the news brands that host them. If I was working for a major news company, I’d be humiliated to see my work juxtaposed with specious celebrity bilge, diet scams, and get-rich-quick schemes.

...

While OpenAI, Google and Meta would like to claim that these are "publicly-available" works that they are "training on," the actual word for what they're doing is "stealing." These models are not "learning" or, let's be honest, "training" on this data, because that's not how they work — they're using mathematics to plagiarize it based on the likelihood that somebody else's answer is the correct one. If we did this as a human being — authoritatively quoting somebody else's figures without quoting them — this would be considered plagiarism, especially if we represented the information as our own. Generative AI allows you to generate lots of stuff from a prompt, allowing you to pretend to do the research much like LLMs pretend to know stuff. It's good for cheating at papers, or generating lots of mediocre stuff LLMs also tend to hallucinate, a virtually-unsolvable problem where they authoritatively make incorrect statements that creates horrifying results in generative art and renders them too unreliable for any kind of mission critical work. Like I’ve said previously, this is a feature, not a bug. These models don’t know anything — they’re guessing, based on mathematical calculations, as to the right answer. And that means they’ll present something that feels right, even though it has no basis in reality. LLMs are the poster child for Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness.

[mariacallous]

As few as 2 percent of New York City’s previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself.

The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city’s short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a “black market” for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she’s seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. “People are going underground,” she says.

New York’s crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand.

Search for a short stay on Airbnb, and there are few places scattered across the map. Many of those old listings have turned into stays of 30 days or longer—meaning they do not need to be registered.

AirDNA, a short-term rental intelligence firm, found just 2,300 short-term rentals on Airbnb in New York City by late September. The number of stays advertised as long-term rentals now makes up 94 percent of Airbnb’s listings in the city, AirDNA’s data shows. Hosts must meet strict requirements to be approved as a short-term rental—they can have only two guests, and the host must be present in the home during the stay. This change banned many whole apartment listings, except for those that fell under a Class B dwelling category, like hotels, boarding houses, and clubs.

But people are finding ways around the rules. Many listings on Airbnb now include a space in the property’s description for hosts to enter a registration number or state that they are exempt. WIRED searched Airbnb for stays in New York and found many short-term rentals that list themselves as exempt from the city’s registration rules, but there are still several entire units available for short stays that do not appear to be hotels or exempt units.

In one listing marked as exempt, the host asks for guests to avoid interacting with the building’s concierge. On another listing, a host claims they used to live in the unit but have moved to New Jersey and now rent it out. One appears to be a rowhome in a mostly residential neighborhood in Brooklyn. Airbnb uses the city’s verification system to flag unregistered units. The company did not provide comment for this story addressing these specific listings flagged by WIRED. Nathan Rotman, the public policy regional lead for Airbnb, says the company is “working closely” with the city as it implements the new registration law.

Inside Airbnb’s data shows some 2,300 short-term properties have listed themselves as exempt from registration on Airbnb. There are a few hundred more that do not say whether they are exempt or registered, according to the data. Another 35,000 are long-term rentals. Airbnb did not confirm the numbers in the data scraped by Inside Airbnb. The Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement in New York, which manages the registration program, did not provide an update on the total number of short-term rentals it has registered, or whether it has issued violations for illegal listings. 

The New York City law is just one striking way cities are fighting back against short-term rentals. Supporters of the rule argued it would free up apartments for New Yorkers, who pay high rent prices and are facing housing shortages and insecurity. But others, including small-time landlords, said it would take away a source of flexible extra income without making a dent in the housing supply crisis.

Those smaller landlords are still pushing New York City councilors to change the rules to allow them to rent out their units. RHOAR is made up of hosts who own and occupy single-family homes or homes with two dwelling units. These hosts feel they have been unfairly looped in with big landlords. Grossman says RHOAR has met with city councilors in hopes of changing the law so that smaller hosts can still legally do short-term renting.

Outside of Airbnb, people are posting listings and seeking short-term rentals in Facebook groups. Ads on Craigslist for rentals have weekly or nightly prices listed—WIRED found one listing with a weekly and nightly price on Craigslist that also appears on Airbnb, but can only be booked for 30 days or longer on Airbnb. These off-platform rentals pose risks to both guests and hosts, who could get scammed without the protections of bigger companies like Airbnb. 

Craigslist did not respond to a request for comment. Meta, Facebook's parent company, did not comment on specific listings flagged by WIRED, but the company's policies require buyers and sellers in Facebook Marketplace to comply with local laws, and the company prohibits people from promoting illegal activity in Facebook pages and groups.  

Then there’s Houfy, another website listing short-term rentals. WIRED found that many of the listings come from guests who joined the site in September, the same month New York’s new registration rules took effect. The intention is for guests to book directly with hosts—think Airbnb without the fees. The site compares prices for the same property on Airbnb and Houfy and claims to show how much people can save by avoiding Airbnb’s fees.

Houfy has received a notice from New York City about the new rule and is “reviewing how to comply with their rules,” Thijs Aaftink, CEO of Houfy, tells WIRED. Aaftink says Houfy, unlike Airbnb and other rental sites, does not take commissions on transactions between hosts and guests, and argues the company “is therefore not part of the transaction.” He says hosts are responsible for complying with local laws when listing properties.

After the rule change, Airbnb is shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has recently said the company is exploring longer rentals, as well as car rentals and dining pop-ups. And it has got its eyes on Paris, its largest market and home to the 2024 Summer Olympics.

“I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way—that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, ‘If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,’” Chesky said during an event in September hosted by Skift, a travel industry news site. “I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way—it’s probably a cautionary tale.”

[datascraping001]

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[educationmore]

Code Your Way into AdTech: Python for Advertising Pros

In today’s fast-paced digital marketing world, advertising is no longer driven purely by creativity — it’s powered by data, automation, and precision targeting. As a result, professionals who understand both marketing strategy and technical skills are in high demand. If you're working in advertising or looking to enter the booming AdTech (Advertising Technology) space, Python can be your most valuable skill to gain a competitive edge.

Python is not just for software developers. Its ease of use, scalability, and wide range of libraries make it the perfect language for data-driven advertising. Whether you want to analyse customer behaviour, automate campaign reports, or personalize ads at scale, Python opens doors that traditional marketing tools can’t.

Why Python Is a Game-Changer in Advertising

The advertising industry is evolving with advanced platforms using AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics. Python allows advertisers to interact directly with APIs from platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms), enabling custom campaign tracking and real-time bidding optimization. You can scrape competitor data, analyse user engagement trends, and even A/B test creatives with scripts that run in the background while you focus on strategy.

More importantly, Python bridges the gap between creative teams and data science departments. Instead of waiting on analysts, marketers who know Python can interpret campaign metrics on their own terms. This kind of autonomy is not just a convenience — it’s a career accelerator.

Learn Locally, Grow Globally

If you're based in Central India and looking to enhance your career, enrolling in a Python Course in Indore could be your first step into the AdTech world. Indore is fast becoming a tech and education hub, and many reputed institutes offer specialized courses that blend Python with real-world advertising use cases. Whether you’re a media planner, digital strategist, or content marketer, gaining hands-on experience in Python will set you apart in job interviews and freelance projects alike.

As more advertising companies move toward automation and data-centric strategies, having technical skills on your résumé can open up roles like AdTech Analyst, Marketing Automation Specialist, or even Performance Marketing Manager. These roles come with higher pay scales and better growth opportunities.

AdTech Careers: Where Python Fits In

Understanding how to code is becoming as crucial as understanding branding. Here’s where Python fits in across the AdTech landscape:

Programmatic Advertising: Use Python scripts to automate bidding and measure real-time performance.

Audience Targeting: Clean and segment large customer datasets using Pandas or NumPy.

Campaign Automation: Schedule social media or email campaigns with Python-based bots.

Analytics & Reporting: Replace spreadsheets with dashboards built using Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly.

With tools like these, Python isn't just a backend language — it's a marketing enabler. And as more agencies seek professionals who can both think creatively and act programmatically, this dual skill set is becoming a gold standard.

Invest in the Right Training

If you're serious about transitioning into AdTech or boosting your current role, finding the right training environment is essential. A trusted Python Institute in Indore can provide mentorship, projects, and practical exercises tailored to digital marketing needs. Look for a course that offers real-time data assignments, access to Ad APIs, and guidance on integrating Python.

These hands-on experiences will not only make your portfolio stronger but also give you the confidence to tackle real advertising challenges. Plus, local learning often provides networking opportunities and placement support — key elements when pivoting your career.

In a world where advertising is increasingly automated and data-driven, Python is no longer optional — it’s essential. If you’re ready to take control of your career and stay relevant in a shifting market, now is the time to code your way into AdTech. Whether you're in Indore or anywhere else, investing in Python today means building a smarter, tech-savvy version of your professional self for tomorrow.

Python vs Java - What Is The Difference - Pros & Cons

[lesterwu]

Reddit's AI Game Looks Different [Bonus]

Reported by The Wall Street Journal on December 10, 2024, Reddit has become one of the most sought-after data sources for AI companies, and it’s making serious money because of it. Once frustrated by AI firms scraping its content for free, Reddit flipped the script in mid-2023 by charging for API access. With a 19-year archive of human conversation, Reddit isn’t just a social platform anymore — it’s a data powerhouse.

This moment has been building. Back in February 2024, The Verge reported on Reddit’s data licensing partnership with Google. As part of the deal, reportedly worth $60 million annually, Google gained access to Reddit’s data API, providing real-time content to support AI model training and enhance Google’s products. In return, Reddit gains access to Google’s Vertex AI tools to improve its own search capabilities. This transforms user-generated data into a valuable revenue stream. As pointed out by the WSJ article, “for the first nine months of 2024, Reddit’s revenue category that includes licensing grew to $81.6 million from $12.3 million a year earlier.”

It’s an interesting case. While most social platforms are investing in AI to improve their user experience and monetization internally, Reddit stands out by monetizing for AI, turning its existing conversations into a product for others to use. Unlike platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, which focus heavily on visual content and algorithm-driven engagement, Reddit is text-based, topic-driven, and rooted in user-generated discussion. Its community structure encourages deeper, more focused conversations — often centered around niche topics — which makes its data not just abundant, but context-rich and highly valuable for training conversational AI. This depth and authenticity are what set Reddit apart in the AI “gold rush”. 

However, it’s still unclear how much long-term impact these licensing deals will have on Reddit’s overall business. According to Reddit’s 10-K filing, the company generated $3.65 billion in revenue in 2024 — a solid increase from previous years, but one still driven largely by advertising. Licensing made headlines, but it’s still a small piece of the pie. That said, Reddit’s partnership with Google also gives it access to advanced AI tools to improve its own search capabilities — a less flashy but potentially transformative upgrade. If better search leads to better user experience, engagement, and ad performance, then the value Reddit is getting from these deals may run deeper than just a licensing check.

Word Count: 394

[chipped-chimera]

THIS. DEAR LORD THIS. THIS IS WHAT HAS BEEN DRIVING ME INSANE ABOUT AI.

Look I have contemplated writing an AI Analysis post coming from an actual artist's perspective SEVERAL times with the knowledge I've accumulated but rarely have the spoons to do it but I'll just do a short bit of it now.

So when something really upsets me that is happening and I have little control, I habitually do this thing where I will actively go out there and research the shit out of it. Because I've spent enough time in therapy to know the thing that scares us the most is the unknown. Make the unknown known? It becomes significantly less scary.

And I am backing it up when they say 'AI is a buzzword'. It 120% is. What the AI labelling is hiding under the world's biggest and perhaps most obfuscated umbrella-term is machine learning.

So it would probably shock you to know, by that metric we have been using AI for YEARS. Your autocomplete keyboard on your phone that remembers your words according to usage? Machine learning. Facial recognition on mobile phone cameras and facebook? Machine learning. The ALGORITHMS that have been driving a lot of my most beloathed social medias for years? MACHINE. LEARNING. Auto-generated captions on videos, reverse image searching, targeted advertising, analysis of weather systems, handwriting recognition, DNA sequencing, search engines, and of course your dynamic enemy 'AI' in videogames that has to react to your actions as a player - these are ALL products of machine learning and by that metric? You have technically been using AI for years but we just didn't call it that yet.

In my great search of understanding all things AI, what an Australian tech journalist commentator said was - we're basically calling anything 'new' in machine learning that we don't quite understand yet collectively 'AI'. And I agree 100%. The reality is AI has been with us since about the 1960s.

Hang on Chimera/Kery I hear you say, on the Wikipedia page of machine learning it says machine learning is a result of trying to build AI, not AI! Yes, but you literally cannot have the 'Intelligence' part without the machine learning part. You take out the learning and you've just got a brick of data that you can't do shit with. The intelligence part comes in when based on the data it's been fed and the responses it has gotten back from it's environment, whether that is a researcher saying yes or no, or literal environmental feedback in a robot that is learning optimal locomotion through a space - it executes actions. So again, by that metric when you whip out your phone to take a selfie and your phone starts to track where your face is? It is executing an action based on its data-set of 'what is a face'. That. Is. AI.

So everything is AI now? Yeah it's an umbrella term, that's what I said. The disparity between knowing what machine learning and AI is to the point we call specific things AI (image generation, large language models, voice generation) and other things 'not AI' (see my long list again) is down to MARKETING.

Let me take you back to the tail 'end' of the pandemic. You're OpenAI and through scraping a lot of publically available data of just people chatting or writing various things - with dubious consent - you have made a really good chat-bot. Yeah you heard me, CHAT-BOT. If you're old like me, you remember chat-bots - they're those goofy things you played with as a teenager and laughed at because it'd say silly things and it'd be funny to put two together trying to talk to each other because they'd begin spouting nonsense and getting stuck in a loop. Or they're the widely hated artificial help systems on government websites embedded in a chatbox that does jack shit. Or the annoying pop up on some website you're just trying to buy shit from and stock-image-sandra is here in a text box 'ready to help you'. Chat-bots have an image problem. You can't release ChatGPT, your fancy chat-bot as a 'chat-bot', how the hell are you supposed to get investors? You've got some really good projects on the go (with dubiously sourced data) but you're running out of money. You need to do something fast.

So you take out the AI umbrella term, and right before everyone is just about ready to leave their hermit-chronically-online-pandemic-induced lifestyles - you drop the metaphorical bomb. You hand over your tech, now with the shiny new AI label, to the public. The AI label hides the fact from the public that you're basically rebranding shit we've had forever and by keeping it purposefully murky you can (hopefully) get people to ignore the fact that you've basically pulled vast swathes of data with dubious consent because - but it's AI! It's such a superior piece of technology! We can't un-invent the wheel because the ends didn't justify the means! It could change the world!

Despite the fact it's been 'changing the world' since 1960 and the only difference here is you linked enough computers together to make it better than what was currently available. But you now have to pay electricity costs for all that tech so, out into the wild it goes!

And now you've triggered a technological arms race and the use of AI (and your bottom line) is skyrocketing! AI that was previously the domain of government and massive corporate use is now in the hands of people to play with - their personal tech literacy be dammed (no literally be dammed, the less they understand the better). And they won't want to have it taken off them - in fact they'll fight each other over the value of your chat-bot and image generator in spite of the fact you stole data to train it. So your profits keep rolling in and next minute, despite your ethos being 'open source to all' - you're getting approached by Microsoft for a partial buy in and now you're 'semi-private', whatever the hell that means. Who cares! Money!

I have so, so much more to say on all this but I'll leave it for a proper post. But the lesson of this very tl;dr history of OpenAI is this: AI is machine learning. Machine learning is a TOOL. AI is a TOOL.

And a tool is only as ethical as the hand that chooses to wield it. Artificial intelligence is neutral. It is not good. It is not bad. It is just like the knife on your kitchen bench, with all the potential of doing good and useful things like help you make dinner and also horrendous, horrible things like commit a violent crime. And who made the knife in your kitchen? Is it artisan? Handcrafted by someone well paid in their profession? Or was it mass produced in third world conditions? Now is your knife itself bad? Should we ban all kitchen knives?

AI is a marketing buzzword for shit we've had for years - this is just the shiny version that went public to get money and we all fell for it hook, line and sinker.

So I challenge you, the next time something wizz-bang-shiny-tech-whatever is placed in front of you, and maybe it's a bit scary - to do what I do. Instead of filing it into a box of good or bad, start arguments online with someone with only limited information over whether someone is 'good' or 'bad' for participating or not participating in use of this technology because it's now emotionally loaded for you - do what I do. RESEARCH IT. Understand it, deeply. Listen to commentary on it from both sides, learn about the intent of why it was handed to you and for the love of god USE SOME CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS.

Because I guarantee you once you do that? Stuff will quickly become a lot less murky. You'll be able to see where your own blindspots are, and prevent them from being exploited - in this case, being taken advantage of by big corporations who are trying to pull and 'oopsie-woopsie' on unethical datasets for profit. You'll be able to hold them accountable. You'll also be less likely to get pulled into stupid arguments online about shit because you know it is way more nuanced than tech-bro putting out his big titty waifu image soup - he's small game here. Who cares about him. Go for the people at the top of this who are hoping to keep sliding on by with their rolling profits because you're too busy having fights among yourselves. Go for them and go for the fucking throat.

Any technology can be used for weal or woe, and it is entirely about the hand who wields it. Or in this case, the hand who programmed it.

If we want to continue to use AI or Machine Learning in an ethical, revolutionary manner we need to stop falling for the marketing, and hold each other accountable to uses that will continue to benefit humanity. Not pull it apart.

So yes. AI is a buzzword. Stop falling for it.

[souhaillaghchimdev]

Digital Marketing Application Programming

In today's tech-driven world, digital marketing is no longer just about catchy ads and engaging posts—it's about smart, automated, data-driven applications. Whether you're a developer building a marketing automation platform or a digital marketer looking to leverage tech, understanding how to program marketing applications is a game changer.

What Is Digital Marketing Application Programming?

Digital Marketing Application Programming refers to the development of tools, systems, and scripts that help automate, optimize, and analyze digital marketing efforts. These applications can handle tasks like SEO analysis, social media automation, email campaigns, customer segmentation, and performance tracking.

Key Areas of Digital Marketing Applications

Email Marketing Automation: Schedule and personalize email campaigns using tools like Mailchimp API or custom Python scripts.

SEO Tools: Build bots and crawlers to check page speed, backlinks, and keyword rankings.

Social Media Automation: Use APIs (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) to schedule posts and analyze engagement.

Analytics and Reporting: Integrate with Google Analytics and other platforms to generate automated reports and dashboards.

Ad Campaign Management: Use Google Ads API or Meta Ads API to manage and analyze advertising campaigns.

Popular Technologies and APIs

Python: Great for automation, scraping, and data analysis.

JavaScript/Node.js: Excellent for real-time applications, chatbots, and front-end dashboards.

Google APIs: For accessing Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console data.

Facebook Graph API: For managing posts, ads, and analytics across Facebook and Instagram.

Zapier/IFTTT Integration: No-code platforms for connecting various marketing tools together.

Example: Sending an Automated Email with Python

import smtplib from email.mime.text import MIMEText def send_email(subject, body, to_email): msg = MIMEText(body) msg['Subject'] = subject msg['From'] = 'you@example.com' msg['To'] = to_email with smtplib.SMTP('smtp.example.com', 587) as server: server.starttls() server.login('you@example.com', 'yourpassword') server.send_message(msg) send_email("Hello!", "This is an automated message.", "client@example.com")

Best Practices

Use APIs responsibly and within rate limits.

Ensure user privacy and comply with GDPR/CCPA regulations.

Log all automated actions for transparency and debugging.

Design with scalability in mind—marketing data grows fast.

Secure API keys and sensitive user data using environment variables.

Real-World Use Cases

Marketing dashboards pulling real-time analytics from multiple platforms.

Automated tools that segment leads based on behavior.

Chatbots that qualify sales prospects and guide users.

Email drip campaigns triggered by user activity.

Dynamic landing pages generated based on campaign source.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is being transformed by smart programming. Developers and marketers working together can create systems that reduce manual labor, improve targeting, and increase ROI. Whether you're automating emails, analyzing SEO, or building AI chatbots—coding skills are a superpower in digital marketing.

[mariacallous]

On July 19, Bloomberg News reported what many others have been saying for some time: Twitter (now called X) was losing advertisers, in part because of its lax enforcement against hate speech. Quoted heavily in the story was Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, whose work has highlighted several instances in which Twitter has allowed violent, hateful, or misleading content to remain on the platform.

The next day, X announced it was filing a lawsuit against the nonprofit and the European Climate Foundation, for the alleged misuse of Twitter data leading to the loss of advertising revenue. In the lawsuit, X alleges that the data CCDH used in its research was obtained using the login credentials from the European Climate Foundation, which had an account with the third-party social listening tool Brandwatch. Brandwatch has a license to use Twitter’s data through its API. X alleges that the CCDH was not authorized to access the Twitter/X data. The suit also accuses the CCDH of scraping Twitter’s platform without proper authorization, in violation of the company’s terms of service.

X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s research shows that hate and disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the platform under Musk’s ownership, and this lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts,” says Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH.

Experts who spoke to WIRED see the legal action as the latest move by social media platforms to shrink access to their data by researchers and civil society organizations that seek to hold them accountable. “We're talking about access not just for researchers or academics, but it could also potentially be extended to advocates and journalists and even policymakers,” says Liz Woolery, digital policy lead at PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression. “Without that kind of access, it is really difficult for us to engage in the research necessary to better understand the scope and scale of the problem that we face, of how social media is affecting our daily life, and make it better.”

In 2021, Meta blocked researchers at New York University’s Ad Observatory from collecting data about political ads and Covid-19 misinformation. Last year, the company said it would wind down its monitoring tool CrowdTangle, which has been instrumental in allowing researchers and journalists to monitor Facebook. Both Meta and Twitter are suing Bright Data, an Israeli data collection firm, for scraping their sites. (Meta had previously contracted Bright Data to scrape other sites on its behalf.) Musk announced in March that the company would begin charging $42,000 per month for its API, pricing out the vast majority of researchers and academics who have used it to study issues like disinformation and hate speech in more than 17,000 academic studies.

There are reasons that platforms don’t want researchers and advocates poking around and exposing their failings. For years, advocacy organizations have used examples of violative content on social platforms as a way to pressure advertisers to withdraw their support, forcing companies to address problems or change their policies. Without the underlying research into hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful content on social media, these organizations would have little ability to force companies to change. In 2020, advertisers, including Starbucks, Patagonia, and Honda, left Facebook after the Meta platform was found to have a lax approach to moderating misinformation, particularly posts by former US president Donald Trump, costing the company millions.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter in late October 2022, he proceeded to fire many of the staff members responsible for keeping hate speech and misinformation off the platform and reinstated the accounts of users who had been previously banned, including Trump and influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently indicted under human trafficking laws in Romania. A study released earlier this year from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, Oregon State University, UCLA, and UC Merced found that hate speech increased dramatically after Musk took the helm at Twitter. Over roughly the same time period, the company saw its advertising revenue slashed in half as brands—including General Motors, Pfizer, and United Airlines—fled the platform, apparently concerned about their products appearing next to misinformation and hate speech.

And this has bothered Musk, immensely. On November 4, 2022, he tweeted, “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

PEN America’s Woolery worries that, whether or not X’s lawsuit against CCDH holds water, the cost of fighting it will be enough to intimidate other organizations doing similar work. “Lawsuits like this, especially when we are talking about a nonprofit, are definitely seen as an attempt to silence critics,” she says. “If a nonprofit or another individual is not in a financial position where they can really, truly give it all it takes to defend themselves, then they run the risk of either having a poor defense or of simply settling and just trying to get out of it to avoid incurring further costs and reputational damage.”

But the lawsuit doesn’t just put pressure on researchers themselves. It also highlights another avenue through which it now may be more difficult for advocates to access data: third-party social listening platforms. These companies access and analyze data from social platforms to allow their clients—from national security contractors to marketing agencies—to gain insights into their audiences and target messages.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, a nonprofit that tracks anti-Semitism online in both English and Arabic, says that in November 2022, shortly after Musk took ownership of the company, CyberWell reached out to Talkwalker, a third-party social listening company, to get a subscription that would allow them to analyze anti-Semitic speech on the platform then called Twitter.

Cohen Montemayor says Talkwalker told her the company could not take them on as a client because of the nature of CyberWell’s work. She says it appears that “the existing open source tools and social listening tools are being reserved and paywalled only for advertisers and paid researchers. Nonprofit organizations are actively being blocked from using these resources.”

Talkwalker did not respond to a request for comment about whether its agreements with X prohibit it from taking on organizations doing hate speech monitoring as clients. X did not respond to questions about what parameters it sets for the kinds of customers that third-party social listening companies can take on.

According to X’s lawsuit against CCDH, a 2023 agreement between Brandwatch and X outlined that any breach of X data via Brandwatch’s customers would be considered the responsibility of the social listening company. On X competitor Bluesky, Yoel Roth, the former senior director of trust and safety at Twitter, posted, “Brandwatch’s social listening business is entirely, completely, 100% dependent on Twitter data access, so I guess it’s not surprising to see how far backwards they’re bending to placate the company.”

For its part, in a July 20 tweet, Brandwatch referenced the same CCDH report cited in the X lawsuit, saying, “Recently, we were cited in an article about brand relevance that relied on incomplete and outdated data. It contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about Twitter.”

Brandwatch did not respond to a request for comment.

But CCDH’s Ahmed says the assertion that his organization’s research is based on incomplete data is a way for X to obfuscate problems with its own platform. “Whenever you claim that you’ve found information on there, they just say, ‘No, it’s a lie. Only we have the data. You couldn't possibly know the truth. Only we know the truth. And we grade our own homework,’” he says.

A representative from another third-party social listening tool that uses X data, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their company from retaliation by X, confirmed to WIRED that companies like theirs are heavily reliant on Twitter/X data. “A lot of the services that are very Twitter-centric, a lot of them are 100 percent Twitter,” they say, noting that Instagram has long since shut down its API, and that conversations on Meta’s platforms tend not to be as public as those on X. “In terms of data, Twitter continues to play a significant role in providing data to analytics companies.” They note that, while X’s new paid-for API has put the squeeze on third-party analytics companies—“it’s basically almost like they’re holding you for ransom”—losing access to X data entirely could kill a company.

They add that they have not seen guidelines that restrict the use of X data for hate speech or advocacy research, but there are specific “know your customer” guidelines that prohibit sharing X data with government agencies without prior permission. The same day X announced the lawsuit, on July 31, America First Legal, a right-wing nonprofit led by former Trump appointee Stephen Miller, announced that it had filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to examine communications between CCDH and various US government agencies, alleging that it is a “coordinator of illegal censorship activities.” (Ahmed says his organization has never coordinated with the US government). This would, if true, seemingly also be a violation of those terms of service.

The X lawsuit also alleges that the CCDH is being funded by X’s competitors as well as “government entities and their affiliates,” but says that “X Corp. currently lacks sufficient information to include the identities of these entities, organizations, and persons in this Complaint.”

Even without legal threats, there are significant costs to researchers focused on disinformation and hate speech on platforms. Experts who spoke to WIRED say they worry the threat of legal action could cause a chilling effect on other organizations that study hate speech and disinformation.

After publishing a report showing that anti-Semitic content had doubled on the platform after Musk’s takeover, Sasha Havlicek, cofounder and CEO of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based think tank focused on extremism and disinformation, says the company experienced a deluge of abusive tweets. “In response, Twitter came out with a thread that got 3 million views or so,” she says. “Musk himself responded with a poop emoji.”

In December, Musk worked with right-wing journalists to release the so-called Twitter Files, a selection of internal documents that seemed to show that pre-Musk Twitter had silenced some conservative users. Some of the documents included the names and emails of disinformation researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, many of whom were undergraduate students at the time. One former student, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of harassment, says that people whose emails ended up in the Twitter Files have been targets of ongoing harassment for their role in disinformation research.

“Seeing how things have gone, and seeing the possibility of being harassed, has made a lot of people that worked on it very closely to now think twice,” says the former student.

“You have to ask,” says the ISD’s Havlicek. “Who’s the censor now?”

Havlicek says she hopes that the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which will eventually mandate access for researchers to data from large social platforms, will be a road map for other countries. Whether there will be legal land mines regarding data pulled legally by European researchers under the DSA but shared with non-European researchers or advocates is another open question.

“I was in Brussels a few weeks ago talking to the Digital Services people about how we can use the data that will be made available through the DSA data transparency regime,” says Ahmed. “And when that appears, we will use that in the most effective way possible.”