Elon accuses Substack of "illegally downloading vast amounts of data to pre-populate their Twitter clone." "massive theft of Twitter data"
(and Elon says that this is the reason twitter's systems censored substack, but that part of the story isn't what we'll be evaluating here. My guess is that most of what twitter did to them was deliberate and vindictive, but that the initial response could have been triggered by automatic systems, and it would be meaningful if it had been.)
What made this interesting for me is that I seem to remember seeing Substack claim that they didn't do it, though I'm unable to source it now, it'd be greatly appreciated if someone could find substack's response to the accusation.
I'll resolve the market when we learn one way or the other. I'm open to resolving N/A if we still lack evidence past a certain date. (Should I? Ah, Manifold has forced me to pick a closing date, it's arbitrary, though, willing to extend if necessary.)
Apr 19, 1:32pm: Is Elon Musk's accusation against Substack true? → Will Elon Musk's accusation against Substack turn out to be true?
The only thing I can think of is downloading twitter's who follows who network data to reccomend people 'follow these substackers you follow on twitter'!
That's plausible but eh. Combine that with it being illegal or theft (is archive.org's twitter scraping illegal?) and 40% seems high.
Although it'll probably N/A as no news comes out, proving a negative etc
@jacksonpolack But that's not a trivial application, finding your people can be very inconvenient otherwise.
If it is illegal, it's one of many shitty things elon's twitter is doing that should provoke a change in the law: Competition is much more fair if it's easy for users to export their data to other systems, especially when that data is already practically public and non law-abiding applications can "steal" it whenever they want.