Elon Musk has been serious about putting an end to data scraping. In early July, the billionaire imposed temporary Tweet limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and platform manipulation.” Now, Musk’s X Corp. is suing four unnamed individuals over allegations of illegal data scraping from Twitter. Filed in a Dallas County, Texas, court on July 6, the lawsuit seeks over $1 million in damages.

Twitter is not amused by data scraping

As reported by CNBC, X Corp., the parent company of Twitter, sued four unknown individuals last week over data scraping. Musk’s company seeks more than $1 million in damages for “unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents,” according to the report. The filing of the case states that the defendants allegedly contracted with operators of data-processing facilities in Dallas County, Texas.

Twitter

According to the filing, the company has been unable to determine the identity of the individuals. However, in place of names, attorneys for X Corp. have provided a list of four IP addresses.

For the unknown, data scraping is a technique where a computer program extracts data from a website or other online source. This data can then be used for a variety of purposes, such as market research, price comparison, or even social media monitoring.

Elon Musk put the kibosh on data scraping by limiting how many tweets users could read each day. Unverified accounts were capped at a measly 600 posts, while verified (read: paid) accounts were allowed to view a generous 6,000 tweets. The defendants in this lawsuit were apparently responsible for those limits. “These requests have severely burdened X Corp’s servers. and degrading the user experience for millions of X Corp.’s customers,” the suit says.

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