Twitter has filed a lawsuit towards 4 unnamed entities in Texas for knowledge scraping, a neighborhood TV station mentioned on Wednesday, explaining why the Elon Musk-owned social community had lately positioned day by 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 particular person might ship to an individual, which severely taxed Twitter’s servers.
It mentioned the lawsuit was filed on July 6 within the District Court docket 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 enterprise hours.
Musk has blamed knowledge scraping for limiting, since early July, what number of tweets totally 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.
“A number of entities tried to scrape each tweet ever made in a brief time period. That’s the reason we needed to put charge limits in place,” Musk tweeted.
A number of entities tried to scrape each tweet ever made in a brief time period. That’s the reason we needed to put charge limits in place.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
Nonetheless, 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 staff who had entry to commerce secrets and techniques and different confidential info.
© Thomson Reuters 2023