b) Given Twitter is public, user generated content which they don't own but simply have a license I wouldn't call it unethical in the slightest.
I do a lot of data scraping, so I’m sympathetic to the people who want to do it, but violating the robots.txt (or other published policies) is absolutely unethical, regardless of the license of the content the service is hosting. Another way of describing an unauthorised usecase taking a service offline is a denial of service attack, which (again, if Musk’s description of the problem is accurate) seems to be the issue Twitter was facing, with a choice between restricting services or scaling forever to meet the scrapers requirements.
Personally I would have probably tried to start with a captcha, but all this dogpiling just looks like low effort Musk hate. The prevailing sentiment on HN has become so passionately anti-Musk that it’s hard to view any criticism of him or Twitter here with any credibility.
The only reason these websites and platforms aggregate any content at all is because they're effectively giant public squares.
Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it...
(Clearly it's not a public square, but his position is incoherent).
It is NOT legal to install cameras that record everyone's conversations, much less sell the laundered results.
Pre-2023 people went on Twitter with the expectation that their output would be read by humans.
A traditional search engine is different: It redirects to the original. A bastardized search engine that shows snippets is more questionable, but still miles away from the AI steal.
Expectations =/= reality. And the reality is that bits have been reading comments for over a decade.
If it doesn't respect robots.txt, it is unethical.