🧵 We think that the Van Buren v. United States case before the Supreme Court today is a threat to data journalism. So much so that we filed an amicus brief. This is why:
The case deals with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and its definition of "exceeds authorized access" in relation to one’s intentionally accessing a computer system they have authorization to access.
Van Buren was a police officer arrested by the FBI and convicted of computer fraud in Georgia after he used his access to work databases for personal financial gain.
The CFAA is broadly used as an anti-hacking law. The problem is in how it gets interpreted. Depending on how this case goes, other data-driven activities could be considered a crime, including web scraping.
Web scraping is the act of extracting data from websites. Website data, even data you provide to a site, is controlled by the government or company that made the website with rules called affordances.
Extracting or scraping that data for analysis flips the power balance so that the audience decides what can be done with the data.
Computer science researchers use web scraping to monitor advertisements on Facebook (@LauraEdelson2 and NYU Ad Observatory).
Search engines use it to power algorithms that personalize your results.
The Internet Archive uses it to ensure that knowledge and culture don’t get lost when a webpage goes offline.
Data journalists like the team at @TheMarkup use web scraping to investigate Big Tech. It is vital to the work we do.
Most recently, The Markup’s @leonyin and @adrjeffries scraped Google trends and Google search when investigating Google’s top search results for bias. themarkup.org/google-the-gia…
Creating these new datasets allowed them to directly answer questions they were asking rather than using existing datasets that were created for other purposes.
https://twitter.com/LeonYin/status/1320758473026658304
Other great examples of journalistic scraping in the public interest include @TheAtlantic & @alexismadrigal’s essential COVID Tracking Project. covidtracking.com
. @JuliaAngwin and @suryamattu’s investigation for @ProPublica into the Amazon algorithm giving itself a boost. propublica.org/article/amazon…
. @dmehro and @dellcam’s investigation for @gizmodo into Ring’s hidden data map. gizmodo.com/ring-s-hidden-…
. @NYTimes’ results tracking during the 2020 election. alex.github.io/nyt-2020-elect…
So when we say #ScrapingIsNotACrime, this is what we mean. Web scraping is a foundational activity that allows data scientists, journalists, and others to hold powerful tech companies accountable.
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