(Reuters) -Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data scraping last week, a move that showed why the Elon Musk-owned social network recently placed daily limits on the number of tweets a user could read.
The complaint by Musk’s X Corp, which owns Twitter, alleged that the entities indulged in “unlawfully scraping data” and sought monetary relief of more than $1 million, the lawsuit said.
The daily limits imposed in July by Twitter sparked widespread criticism and have helped Threads, the recently launched rival service by Meta that crossed 100 million signups in a record five days.
Musk, meanwhile, reiterated the reason for data limits in a reply to a tweet that referenced the data-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.
Twitter did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the lawsuit outside regular business hours.
The volume of automated signup requests from the four defendants’ IP addresses far exceeded what any single person could send to a person, which severely taxed Twitter’s servers, the lawsuit claimed.
The case is X Corp Vs John Does 1-4, in the district court of Dallas County, Texas, no. DC-23-09157.
(Reporting by Shubham Kalia and Juby Babu in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza and Arun Koyyur)
