Twitter owner and CTO Elon Musk is apparently in no mood to spare the data scrappers, as the company has filed a lawsuit against four entities in Dallas County over alleged data scrapping from the Musk-owned social media platform. X-Corp—Musk’s company that operates Twitter partially blamed these people/entities for the recent issues with Twitter.
The said lawsuit was filed on July 6 against four accused identified as John Doe 1, John Doe 2, John Doe 3, and John Doe 4 or by the IP addresses. The defendants are accused of “widespread unlawful data scraping.”
In response to a tweet about the said lawsuit, Musk wrote today, “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.”
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
Data Scrapping
The lawsuit filed by X-Corp explains data scraping as “a form of unauthorised data collection that uses automation and other processes to harvest data from a website or a mobile application.”
According to the lawsuit, “Scraping interferes with the legitimate operation of websites and mobile applications, including Twitter, by placing millions of requests that tax the capacity of servers and impair the experience of actual users.” Online platforms may become less stable as a result of the technology employed by data scrapers to send enormous amounts of queries and avoid detection, which might also negatively affect the experience for legitimate users.
It was further argued that Twitter’s servers were heavily burdened by the volume of automated sign-up requests coming from the four defendants’ IP addresses, which were considerably beyond what any single individual could send to another person.
In addition to the time and money invested in the investigation, the lawsuit claims that these activities amount to “unjust enrichment” at the expense of X Corp. and have hurt both the company and the user experience.
The accusations made against the defendants were brought in Dallas County, Texas, according to the lawsuit, since it was claimed that they had “committed acts… with entities that maintain data processing facilities in Dallas County, Texas… including, on information and belief, unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents.”
Twitter also raised concerns over how the scrapped data including personal information of its is repackaged and sold.
“Twitter users have no control over how data-scraping companies repackage and sell their personal information,” the lawsuit read.
Twitter on its measures to prohibit data scraping
Moreover, the suit mentioned that the company has taken several technological measures to curb data scrapping. It also cited the recently introduced limits on how many tweets each user can view in a given day.
Notably, on July 1, Elon Musk announced that the social media platform has temporarily restricted the number of tweets a user can see per day. As per the information provided by Musk via his tweets, Blue Verified users can see up to 10,000 tweets per day, while unverified Twitter users can only see a thousand tweets per day. If a user is new to Twitter, only 500 tweets per day are permitted.
In addition to this, Twitter recently began blocking unregistered users from browsing through the social media platform. Elon Musk in reply to a tweet stated that it is a “temporary emergency measure” as he claimed that data pillaging is degrading the service for all users.
Lastly, X Corp. sought that the defendants pay compensatory damages to the court, including the forfeiture of any profits they may have made; the precise amount of these damages would be decided at trial.
