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Automated Means

Definition: A clause restricting — or occasionally enabling — the use of bots, scripts, scrapers, or other automated tools. It either regulates how users/creators may interact with a platform, or governs how the platform itself may access content programmatically. Risk level: Cuts both ways. As a restriction on users, it’s a legitimate anti-fraud/anti-spam control (anti-bot, anti-fake-engagement rules). As a restriction on third parties accessing platform content (anti-scraping), it determines who — including AI labs building training datasets — can or can’t programmatically collect that content, and on what terms.

Platforms Using This Clause

Common Wording

engaging in indiscriminate following – following and/or unfollowing a large number of unrelated accounts in a short time period, particularly by automated means; * engaging with posts aggressively or through the use of automation to drive traffic or attention to accounts, websites, products, services, or initiatives… — X, Community Guidelines, 2025-07-22 — regulates users’ bot-like behavior (fake engagement, follow/unfollow churn), not X’s own use of automation on user data.

If you are found to artificially inflate the number of views on your posts through promoted post, manual, automated, or other means, or manipulate the platform to alter the views on your posts, you will forfeit any amount due to you and you will be terminated from the Program. — X, Other (Creator monetization terms), 2024-02-21 — an anti-fraud control tied to creator payouts, not a data-access restriction.

3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except: (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission; or (c) as permitted by applicable law… — YouTube, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present unchanged in every scrape through 2025-10-03) — restricts automated access to the platform itself, with a narrow robots.txt-based carve-out for search engines and broad platform discretion over everyone else, including AI-training data-collection bots.

• o. “SDKs” means any object code, source code, or documentation you receive from us that helps you create Apps or content for use with the Platform. * p. “Service Provider” means an entity you use to provide you services in connection with Platform or any Platform Data… — Facebook, Other (Platform Terms, Glossary), 2022-07-11 — note: this snippet is tagged automated means in the source data but the substring “automat” does not appear anywhere in any of this page’s 6 unique captures (verified programmatically). It’s actually a crop of the alphabetically-lettered Glossary section. Flagged as a likely keyword/window-alignment mismatch (see that page’s Overview) rather than a confirmed automated-means clause.

You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data you do not have permission to access. — Facebook, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present in substance throughout) — a confirmed, genuine anti-scraping clause (literal keyword match), broader and less structured than YouTube’s robots.txt-aware carve-out: Meta holds unstructured discretion over all exceptions (“our prior permission”).

…m. “Process” means any operation or set of operations performed on data or sets of data, whether or not by automated means, including use, collection, storage, sharing, or transmission… — Instagram, Other (Platform Terms, Glossary), 2026-02-04 — same Glossary-crop mismatch pattern as Facebook’s “Other” page (5 of Instagram’s 6 captures contain no “automat” substring), except this latest capture happens to land on the Glossary’s definition of “Process,” which genuinely contains the literal phrase “automated means” — the first accurate capture under this keyword on either Meta “Other” page, purely by coincidence of which Glossary letter-range was scraped.

We work with our Affiliates and use a mix of technology (including through automated means), human moderation, and reports from users to identify breaches of and enforce these Terms and our Community Guidelines and any additional applicable terms and take action to protect our users. — TikTok, Terms of Service, 2023-01-11 (present in substance throughout; confirmed genuine — all 4 unique captures contain the literal phrase) — a third confirmed framing alongside X’s (regulating users’ own behavior) and YouTube’s/Facebook’s (anti-scraping/platform-access): TikTok discloses its own use of automated technology, combined with human moderation, to detect Terms/Community Guidelines violations — closest in kind to YouTube’s Community Guidelines classifier-training disclosure, but framed at the Terms-of-Service level.

You must create the profiles manually and not via automated means, such as scripts. — LinkedIn, Other (Developer Agreement, Test Profiles), 2022-07-11 (present in substance throughout 5 scrapes) — a fourth, confirmed framing distinct from all others tracked here: not anti-scraping, not platform-self-disclosure, and not general fake-engagement policing, but a narrow anti-bot rule restricting how developers may create LinkedIn test accounts during API integration testing.

You will not use any robot, spider, crawler, scraper or other automated means or interface to access the Services or extract other users’ information. — Snapchat, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present in substance throughout 34 scrapes) — a conventional, confirmed anti-scraping restriction, structurally closest to Facebook’s Terms of Service: a flat ban with no robots.txt-style carve-out for search engines.

“crawling” or “scraping”, whether manually or by automated means, or otherwise using any automated means (including bots, scrapers, and spiders), to view, access or collect information, or using any part of the Services or Content to train a machine learning or AI model… — Spotify, Acceptable Use Policy, 2023-05-08 (present unchanged in substance across all 4 scrapes through 2025-10-03) — a conventional, confirmed anti-scraping restriction, distinctive for being bundled directly with an explicit AI/ML-training ban in the same sentence — see Train AI/Models.

…make any unauthorized use of the Service, including collecting usernames and/or email addresses of users by electronic or other means for the purpose of sending unsolicited email, or creating user accounts by automated means or under false pretenses. — TruthSocial, Terms of Service, 2024-03-14 (present in substance throughout 14 scrapes) — a conventional, confirmed anti-bot restriction within a broader “Prohibited Activities” list, targeting automated account creation specifically rather than content scraping.

…access any website, server, software application, or other computer resource owned, used, and/or licensed by Twitch, including but not limited to the Twitch Services, by means of any robot, spider, scraper, crawler, or other automated means for any purpose, or bypass any measures Twitch may use to prevent or restrict access to any website, server, software application, or other computer resource owned, used, and/or licensed by Twitch… — Twitch, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present in substance throughout 20 scrapes) — a conventional, confirmed anti-bot restriction within a numbered “Don’ts” list, bundled alongside a reverse-engineering ban; protects Twitch’s own site/software rather than User Content.

You must not (or assist others to) directly, indirectly, through automated or other means access, use, copy, adapt, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, distribute, license, sublicense, transfer, display, perform, or otherwise exploit our Services in impermissible or unauthorized manners… including that you must not directly or through automated means: …(e) create accounts for our Services through unauthorized or automated means; (f) collect information of or about our users in any impermissible or unauthorized manner… — WhatsApp, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present in substance throughout 7 scrapes) — a conventional, confirmed anti-bot restriction, distinctive for explicitly banning both automated account creation and automated data collection about users in the same numbered list — see Sublicense for the adjacent restriction.

Except as expressly authorized by LinkedIn in writing, use any automated means or form of scraping or data extraction to access, modify, download, query or otherwise collect information from LinkedIn’s websites… — LinkedIn, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (confirmed present through 2023-08-08; absent from the document by 2023-10-15, confirmed via raw cross-check that the entire B2B Jobs Services section was removed — see that platform page’s Overview) — a confirmed anti-scraping use, structurally closest to Facebook’s/YouTube’s Terms of Service occurrences, but scoped specifically to LinkedIn’s Jobs Services for hiring customers.

You may not interfere with the Services in any way, such as by accessing the Services through automated means in a manner that puts excessive demand on the Services; by hacking the Services; by accessing without authorization areas of the Services that are protected by technical measures designed to prevent unauthorized access… — Parler, Terms of Service, 2022-07-11 (present in substance across all 28 scrapes through 2026-02-06) — a confirmed, conventional anti-bot restriction on general users, bundled in the same sentence with anti-hacking and unauthorized-access prohibitions rather than isolated as a standalone clause.

In using Pinterest, you agree not to scrape, collect, search, copy or otherwise access data or content from Pinterest in unauthorized ways, such as by using automated means (without our express prior permission), or access or attempt to access data you do not have permission to access. — Pinterest, Terms of Service, 2023-08-02 (present in substance throughout) — a confirmed, conventional anti-scraping restriction bundled with scrape in the same sentence — see Scrape.

Notes & Trends

X’s two occurrences both regulate users’/creators’ own automated behavior (fake engagement, payout fraud) — neither is X restricting outside parties from scraping X itself (that restriction lives under the scrape keyword on X’s Terms of Service instead). YouTube’s occurrence is the only one of the three that’s a genuine anti-scraping/platform-access clause, and it’s more structured than a flat ban: it pre-authorizes well-behaved search-engine crawlers via robots.txt while leaving everyone else — including AI-training scrapers — needing YouTube’s discretionary written permission. Worth watching whether other platforms’ “automated means” language clusters more like X’s (regulating users) or YouTube’s (regulating outside access) as more sources are ingested. Facebook’s occurrence adds a third pattern to watch for: a clean keyword/content mismatch (Glossary text, no scraping language at all) — the second such mismatch found in this wiki for this exact keyword, after YouTube_Other.md’s separate scrape mismatch, suggesting “automated means” may be a particularly noisy tag in the underlying source dataset. Facebook’s Terms of Service, however, is a clean, confirmed YouTube-style occurrence — restricting third-party access to the platform itself, just without YouTube’s structured robots.txt carve-out. Instagram’s “Other” page mostly repeats Facebook’s mismatch, but its newest capture genuinely contains the phrase — a reminder that “mismatch” findings here describe a specific capture, not a permanent property of the document. TikTok’s Terms of Service adds a clean fourth pattern: TikTok’s own content-moderation/Terms-enforcement use of automated detection tools, captured alongside (though not in the same sentence as) its “For You” feed recommendation-system disclosure. LinkedIn’s “Other” page adds a fifth, narrow pattern: an anti-bot restriction specific to developer test-profile creation during API integration — a use case not seen on any other platform’s Developer Agreement tracked so far. LinkedIn’s Terms of Service adds a sixth, conventional anti-scraping occurrence, notable for being the only one in this wiki confirmed (via raw cross-check) to have genuinely disappeared from its source document through restructuring rather than persisting under different wording. Parler’s Terms of Service adds a seventh conventional occurrence, bundled with anti-hacking language in a single broad “Interference with Services” prohibition. Pinterest’s Terms of Service adds an eighth conventional occurrence, bundled in the same sentence as its scrape restriction. Snapchat’s Terms of Service adds a ninth conventional occurrence present from baseline — though the dataset stops tagging it under this keyword from 2023-08-09 onward. Cross-checked against sources/raw/Snapchat/Terms of Service/2023-08-09T18-33-25Z.md, the identical sentence is confirmed still present verbatim, making this a tagging-coverage artifact (like LINE’s and Parler’s cases) rather than a genuine removal. A longer, restructured version of the same restriction reappears under this tag from 2025-03-06 onward, bundled with the newly-added scrape keyword — see Scrape. Spotify’s Acceptable Use Policy adds a tenth conventional occurrence, the most directly AI-training-relevant of any: the anti-scraping ban and the anti-AI-training ban appear in the same sentence, rather than as adjacent or separate clauses. TruthSocial’s Terms of Service adds an eleventh conventional occurrence, targeting automated account creation specifically within a broader “Prohibited Activities” list rather than bulk content scraping. Twitch’s Terms of Service adds a twelfth conventional occurrence, protecting the platform’s own site/software from bots rather than User Content, bundled in the same numbered list as a reverse-engineering ban. WhatsApp’s Terms of Service adds a thirteenth conventional occurrence, distinctive for explicitly banning both automated account creation and automated collection of user data in the same numbered “Don’ts” list.