Twitter, the popular social media platform, has filed a lawsuit against four John Does for allegedly engaging in widespread unlawful scraping of data from the website. The lawsuit, filed by Twitter’s parent company X Corp., refers to the defendants as “unknown persons or entities” and only mentions their IP addresses. It accuses them of flooding Twitter with automated requests that far exceed what any single individual could send to a server in a given period, with the aim of scraping data.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, responded to a tweet about the lawsuit and stated that these entities attempted to scrape the entirety of Twitter in a short period of time. He also blamed them for the rate limits that Twitter recently implemented. Musk had previously announced in early July that Twitter was putting a strict cap on how many tweets users can read each day to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. Unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts a day, while verified accounts were allowed to see 6,000 tweets. The defendants in this lawsuit were apparently responsible for these limits, which Musk claimed were necessary to protect the platform.
According to the lawsuit filed by X Corp., the defendants’ activities involved unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents. However, it is worth noting that the US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled in 2022 that scraping publicly available data online does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This ruling came as a result of a long-running lawsuit between LinkedIn and a data scraping company, which LinkedIn had sued to prevent it from scraping information visible on users’ public profiles.
In its complaint, X Corp. argues that data scraping companies profit from the innovation of companies like Twitter while simultaneously harming them and compromising user data. The company is seeking $1 million in damages to compensate for the defendants’ actions.
It is important to mention that the scraping of publicly available data has been the subject of legal disputes and debates in recent years. While some argue that scraping can be beneficial for data analysis and innovation, others believe that it can infringe upon privacy rights and intellectual property rights. The outcome of this lawsuit could have implications for future cases involving data scraping and the boundaries of online data usage.
In conclusion, Twitter’s parent company X Corp. has filed a lawsuit against four individuals or entities for allegedly engaging in unlawful data scraping. The defendants are accused of flooding Twitter with automated requests to scrape data that far exceeded normal limits. Elon Musk, in his response to the lawsuit, blamed them for the rate limits implemented on the platform. It remains to be seen how the legal proceedings will unfold and what impact the outcome of this case may have on the future of data scraping.
