Twitter CEO Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and start-ups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.
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Elon Musk’s X Corp. (Twitter’s parent company) last week filed a lawsuit against four unidentified entities over data scraping on Twitter.
Data scraping is when automated programs search publicly accessible websites to gather data that can then be used for a variety of purposes, including training large language models for artificial intelligence, targeting online ads, and more.
X Corp. Seeks Over $1M for “Illegal Theft of Data Related to Texas Residents” case, the case has been filed in Dallas County District Court, Texas. The filing also states that the defendants allegedly entered into a contract with the operator of the data processing facility in Dallas County, Texas.
According to the filing, the company “was unable to determine the identities of these individuals,” but X Corp.’s lawyers listed four IP addresses in place of names.
Data scraping is generally legal in the United States when it involves grabbing publicly accessible data, according to one company. Landmark ruling in 2022 The lawsuit, filed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ends LinkedIn’s years-long legal battle over the practice. The ruling reiterated an appeals court ruling that scraping public data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The X Corp. petition directly follows the rate limits Musk set on Twitter earlier this month, when he decided that users could only read a certain number of tweets per day due to “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.” posts on the platform.
“In order to keep up with the high demand on the company’s servers from extremely aggressive data scrapers, the company imposed a limit on the number of tweets each user could view in a single day,” the filing said. Access to tweets.”
It’s unclear whether Twitter tried to block the offending IP addresses when they discovered they were involved in what the company called inappropriate data scraping.
“By unlawfully stealing data, defendants blatantly disregarded not only the company’s terms of service, but also the privacy preferences of Twitter users,” the filing said.
A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. An email sent to the company’s news email address returned an automatic reply with the poo emoji.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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