(Reuters) -Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data scraping, a local TV station said on Wednesday, explaining why the Elon Musk-owned social network had recently placed daily limits on the number of tweets a user could read.
WFAA, an ABC-affiliated TV station, reported 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.
It said the lawsuit was filed on July 6 in the District Court of Dallas County in Texas.
Reuters could not immediately verify if a lawsuit had been filed. Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.
Musk has blamed data scraping for limiting, since early July, how many tweets different tiers of accounts could read each day, a move that sparked widespread criticism.
He reiterated that reasoning on Thursday in 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.
However, he did not confirm or deny that a lawsuit had been filed.
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.
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of hiring former employees who had access to trade secrets and other confidential information.
(Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza)
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