Elon Musk sues 4 unknown people for scraping Twitter data

The Elon Musk-run X Corp has sued four unnamed individuals over unlawfully scraping data from Twitter, seeking over $1 million in damages.

According to the complaint, the four entities, which are identified only by their IP addresses, unlawfully scraped Twitter user data in violation of the platform’s terms of service. 

“X Corp identified particular IP addresses -- including those belonging to defendants -- that were flooding Twitter’s sign-up page with automated requests,” said the lawsuit filed in Dallas, Texas. 

The volume of these requests far exceeded what any single individual could send to a server in a given period and “clearly indicated that these automated requests were aimed at scraping data from Twitter,” it read.

X Corp. said it “has been unable to ascertain” the identities of all four individuals. 

The company alleged the defendants made a profit “from their unauthorised scraping of Twitter data”.

“In response to massive demands on X Corp.’s servers from extremely aggressive data-scrapers, X Corp. has instituted limits on how many Tweets each user could View in a given day,” the lawsuit said. 

“X Corp. has also limited access to Tweets for users who are not signed in to a registered Twitter account.”

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has made several changes to the platform to stop AI companies from scraping Twitter data.

Earlier this month, millions of users were left in the lurch due to “extreme” backend changes at Twitter as Musk said he applied temporary limits on who will read how many posts in a day, in order to prevent data scraping and system manipulation.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” said the Twitter owner.