Elon Musk's Twitter files lawsuit against 4 unnamed Texas entities for data scraping: Report

livemint.com:

Elon Musk owned Twitter had limited the number of tweets a user can view, read or engage with recently. Amid surging debate over the move enforced by Elon Musk and Twitter, the social media giant has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data scraping, a local TV station said on Wednesday.  The report stated that the volume of automated sign-up 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 report further mentioned that the lawsuit was filed on 6 July in the District Court of Dallas County in Texas.

According to CloudFlare, Data scraping refers to a technique in which a computer program extracts data from output generated from another program. Data scraping is commonly manifest in web scraping, the process of using an application to extract valuable information from a website. Musk had earlier flagged the data scraping and limited how many tweets different tiers of accounts could read each day.

"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 defended the move in a tweet.  Musk's move to place the readership cap came days before Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms launched a direct challenge to Twitter with its Threads app. Threads has since raced to cross 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch.