Is It Legal to Scrape LinkedIn, Instagram, X and Other Social Media?

No. LinkedIn's User Agreement, effective November 3, 2025, says members may not "develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots or any other means or processes (such as crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons or any other technology) to scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data from the Services", nor "bypass or circumvent any access controls or use limits of the Services". LinkedIn's robots.txt opens with a notice that "the use of robots or other automated means to access LinkedIn without the express permission of LinkedIn is strictly prohibited", and that permitted crawling is limited to approved search engines under LinkedIn's crawling terms.

What did the hiQ case decide?

hiQ Labs sold analytics built from public LinkedIn profiles. In May 2017 LinkedIn sent it a cease-and-desist letter saying further access would violate the CFAA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), California Penal Code § 502(c) and the California law of trespass, and blocked its bots; a week later hiQ sued (opinion, No. 17-16783).

The holding, in the court's terms. The 2022 panel found that hiQ had raised "serious questions" about whether LinkedIn may invoke the CFAA, and that the balance of hardships "tipped sharply" in hiQ's favor, because hiQ would likely go out of business. It read Van Buren's "gates-up-or-down inquiry" this way: a computer hosting public web pages "has erected no gates to lift or lower in the first place", so the concept of "without authorization" does not apply to public websites. A cease-and-desist letter alone did not change that.

What hiQ did not decide:

• It was not a final ruling on the merits. The court said that at the preliminary injunction stage it "did not resolve the companies' legal dispute definitively".
• Contract claims survive. hiQ later lost on breach of the User Agreement.
• Logged-in or fake-account scraping is different. The same court held in Facebook v. Power Ventures that a company which kept accessing password-protected profiles after a cease-and-desist letter acted "without authorization".
• Copyright, trespass and misappropriation were raised by LinkedIn but not decided; the court addressed only the CFAA defense.
• Privacy law outside the US, such as the GDPR, was not part of the case.

The US anti-hacking law itself, and Van Buren (decided June 3, 2021), are covered in what data is legal to scrape.

LinkedIn keeps suing. LinkedIn sued a company that sold LinkedIn data through an API on October 2, 2025; the case ended in a judgment on consent on September 16, 2026 (docket, N.D. Cal. No. 5:25-cv-08393).

Europe. LinkedIn profiles are personal data. France's CNIL fined a company €240,000 whose browser extension collected the contact details of people whose profiles its customers visited on a professional social network, finding among other things no lawful basis (EDPB news).

For the technical side of LinkedIn data, see the LinkedIn scraper API.

Facebook and Instagram. Instagram's Terms of Use bar collecting information in an automated way without Meta's express permission; Meta offers the Graph API instead. In January 2024 a federal court in San Francisco ruled against Meta in its suit over a data company's scraping: Meta's terms governed account holders using its services, not scraping while logged out (order, N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-00077).

X. X's Terms of Service ban crawling or scraping without prior written consent. X's 2023 suit against a data company over scraping was dismissed in May 2024; the court held that X's contract claims over public posts were preempted by copyright law, and the case closed with an end-of-case order on July 1, 2025 (docket, N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-03698).

Reddit. On October 23, 2026, reddit.com/robots.txt disallowed the whole site for every user agent, with the note: "Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content." It points to Reddit's Public Content Policy and to support for research and non-commercial use. Reddit's User Agreement bans scraping without prior written consent; the Data API is the licensed route. Reddit sued Anthropic in 2025 and, in October 2025, Perplexity and three data companies over content collected from Google's results (news overview).

YouTube. YouTube's Terms of Service bar automated access except by public search engines following robots.txt or with YouTube's written permission; the YouTube Data API is the licensed route. Videos and transcripts are copyrighted.

• Use the official API or a licensed data provider where your use fits.
• Collect public, logged-out pages only, and never with fake or borrowed accounts.
• Collect counts, topics and trends rather than identities; drop names and handles you do not need.
• In Europe, record a lawful basis, minimize the fields and set a deletion date.
• Never collect emails or phone numbers for marketing lists.

Managing your own or your clients' social media accounts through proxies, one IP per account, is a different, lawful use; see social media proxies. ProxyField's acceptable use policy forbids fake accounts, fake engagement and access to data behind logins you are not entitled to.

ProxyField's rule for every platform is the same: public pages only, and follow the site's terms.

• LinkedIn User Agreement (effective November 3, 2025)
• linkedin.com/robots.txt
• hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, 9th Cir. No. 17-16783, April 18, 2022, 31 F.4th 1180
• LinkedIn v. hiQ Labs, Supreme Court No. 19-1116, docket (order of June 14, 2021)
• hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, N.D. Cal. No. 3:17-cv-03301, docket
• LinkedIn v. a data provider, N.D. Cal. No. 5:25-cv-08393, docket
• EDPB news, CNIL fine in a data-scraping case
• Instagram Terms of Use
• Meta Graph API
• N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-00077, order of January 23, 2024
• X Terms of Service
• X v. a data company, N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-03698, docket
• reddit.com/robots.txt
• Reddit User Agreement
• Reddit Data API
• YouTube Terms of Service
• YouTube Data API
• GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679
• ICO and others, joint statement on data scraping (August 2023)

This is not legal advice. Laws, court decisions and platforms' terms change, and the primary sources linked on this page are the authority.