Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data scraping, a local TV station said, explaining why the Elon Musk-owned social network had recently placed daily limits on the number of tweets a user could read.
WFAA, an ABC-affiliated TV station, reported that the volume of automated sign-up requests from the four defendants' IP addresses far exceeded what any single person could send to a person, which severely taxed Twitter's servers.
It said the lawsuit was filed on July 6th in the District Court of Dallas County in Texas. It allegedly reads that the sign-up requests “have severely taxed X Corp’s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp’s customers.”
Musk has blamed data scraping for limiting how many tweets different tiers of accounts could read each day. The move, which started in early July, sparked widespread criticism.
He reiterated that reasoning on Thursday in reply to a tweet that referenced the data scraping lawsuit.
"Several entities tried to scrape every tweet ever made in a short period of time. That is why we had to put rate limits in place," Musk tweeted.
However, he did not confirm or deny that a lawsuit had been filed. According to WFAA, the claims against the four defendants were filed in Dallas Country because they committed the scraping “with entities that maintain data processing facilities in Texas.”
Musk's move to place the readership cap came days before Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms launched a direct challenge to Twitter with its Threads app.
Threads has since raced to over 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch. Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of hiring former employees who had access to trade secrets and other confidential information.
With the launch of Threads, Twitter risks turning into an ideological bubble for ultra-conservative and right-wing voices, Cybernews explains.
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