Twitter has sued four unnamed businesses in Texas for data scraping, according to a report from a local TV station.
According to WFAA, an ABC-affiliated TV station, the four defendants’ IP addresses generated significantly more automatic sign-up requests than one person could reasonably send to another person, placing a heavy burden on Twitter’s systems.
It stated that the lawsuit was submitted on July 6 in Texas’ Dallas County District Court.
Since early July, Musk has blamed data scraping for restricting how many tweets different tiers of users might read each day. This action prompted intense backlash.
In response to a tweet about the data harvesting case on Thursday, he reinforced that justification.
“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.
Days before Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta’s Threads platform launched a direct challenge to Twitter, Musk made the decision to set the readership cap.
Since then, Threads has accelerated to reach 100 million sign-ups in just five days after launch. Asserting that Meta hired former employees who had access to trade secrets and other sensitive information, Twitter has vowed to sue Meta.
