According to a report by local U.S. television station WFAA, Twitter (Twitter) has sued four unknown entities in the District Court of Dallas County, Texas, accusing them of data scraping (data scraping), that is, obtaining a large amount of data from the Twitter website through automated means. Twitter claimed that the IP addresses of these defendants sent far more registration requests than any one person could send, severely taxing Twitter’s server resources.
Twitter has been criticized recently for limiting the number of tweets users can read each day, which Musk has explained is to prevent data-scraping. Replying to a tweet on Thursday referring to a data-scraping lawsuit, he said, “There are several entities that try to grab all the tweets that have ever been sent in a short period of time, and that’s why we had to put a limit in place.”
It’s worth noting that Musk’s restriction on user readership came shortly after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Twitter’s competing Threads app, which attracted more than 100 million user signups within five days of launching. Twitter had threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of hiring former employees who had access to its trade secrets and other confidential information.
