Musk’s Twitter sues four Texas entities for data scraping

Twitter has filed a lawsuit in opposition to 4 unnamed entities in Texas for information scraping, an area TV station mentioned on Wednesday, explaining why the Elon Musk-owned social community had just lately positioned every day limits on the variety of tweets a consumer might learn.

WFAA, an ABC-affiliated TV station, reported that the quantity of automated sign-up requests from the 4 defendants’ IP addresses far exceeded what any single individual might ship to an individual, which severely taxed Twitter’s servers.

It mentioned the lawsuit was filed on July 6 within the District Court of Dallas County in Texas.

Reuters couldn’t instantly confirm if a lawsuit had been filed. Twitter didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark exterior common business hours.

Musk has blamed information scraping for limiting, since early July, what number of tweets completely different tiers of accounts might learn every day, a transfer that sparked widespread criticism.

He reiterated that reasoning on Thursday in reply to a tweet that referenced the information 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 didn’t verify or deny {that a} lawsuit had been filed.

Musk’s transfer to put the readership cap got here days earlier than Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms launched a direct problem to Twitter with its Threads app.

Threads has since raced to cross 100 million sign-ups inside 5 days of launch.

Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of hiring former workers who had entry to commerce secrets and techniques and different confidential info.

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