Twitter Takes Legal Action Against Four Unidentified Individuals for Data Extraction Violations
Twitter’s parent company, X Corp., has filed a lawsuit against four individuals or entities referred to as John Does, accusing them of engaging in extensive illegal data scraping from the platform. The lawsuit only identifies them by their IP addresses and alleges that they flooded Twitter with automated requests that far surpassed what any individual could reasonably send to a server within a specific timeframe. Elon Musk commented on the lawsuit, stating that these entities attempted to scrape the entire Twitter platform in a brief period and held them responsible for the rate limits implemented by the website earlier this month.
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
Musk announced in early July that the website would impose a strict limit on how many tweets users could read per day “to address extreme data scraping [and] system manipulation.” Unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, while verified (and therefore paid) accounts were allowed to see 6,000 tweets. The defendants in this lawsuit were apparently guilty of these limits. “These requests have burdened X Corp.’s servers and degraded the user experience of millions of X Corp. customers,” the company wrote in its complaint.
X Corp. also described the defendants’ actions in the lawsuit as “unlawful scraping of information related to Texas residents.” But as CNBC points out, the US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled in 2022 that scraping publicly available information online does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). It was a landmark decision that ended LinkedIn’s long-running lawsuit. The business-focused social media platform filed the complaint in an attempt to prevent rival companies from scraping data that appears on users’ public profiles.
“Data-harvesting companies benefit from the innovations of companies like X Corp. while harming X Corp. and compromising user data,” the company also said in the lawsuit. Twitter is now demanding $1 million in damages to account for the defendants’ actions.
