Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data mining, a local television station said on Wednesday, explaining why the Elon Musk-owned social network recently imposed daily limits on the number of tweets a user can read.
WFAA, an ABC affiliate television station, reported that the volume of automated logging requests for the four defendants’ IP addresses far exceeded what any one person could send to a person, severely taxing Twitter’s servers. .
He said the lawsuit was filed on July 6 in the Dallas County District Court in Texas.
Reuters could not immediately verify whether a lawsuit had been filed. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters outside of normal business hours.
Musk has blamed data scraping for limiting, since early July, the number of tweets different levels of accounts can read each day, a move that drew widespread criticism.
It reiterated that reasoning Thursday in response to a tweet that referenced the data mining lawsuit.
“Multiple entities attempted to remove all tweets that were made in a short period of time. This is why we had to set frequency caps,” Musk tweeted.
Various entities attempted to scrape every tweet ever made in a short period of time. That’s why we had to set rate caps.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
However, he did not confirm or deny that a lawsuit has been filed.
Musk’s move to place the reader limit came days before Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms launched a direct challenge to Twitter with its Threads app.
Since then, Threads has rushed to surpass 100 million subscriptions within five days of launch.
Twitter threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of hiring former employees who had access to trade secrets and other confidential information.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
