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Twitter CEO Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, June 16, 2023.
Chesnot | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X Corp, Twitter’s parent company, sued four unidentified entities last week over data harvesting on Twitter.
Data scraping is when automated programs scan publicly accessible websites to gather data, which can later be used for a wide range of purposes, including training large language models of artificial intelligence, targeting online ads and much more.
X Corp is seeking more than $1 million in damages for “unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents,” according to a filing. the case, which was filed in the District Court of Dallas, Texas. The filing also states that the defendants contracted with operators of data processing facilities in Dallas County, Texas.
The company could not “ascertain the identity” of the individuals, according to the report, but attorneys for X Corp cited four IP addresses in lieu of names.
Data scraping is generally legal in the United States when it involves scraping publicly available data, according to a Historic ruling in 2022 by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals, which culminated in a years-long legal battle by LinkedIn over the practice. The ruling reaffirmed the appeals court’s decision, finding that public data scraping did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
X Corp’s solicitation follows directly on price caps imposed by Musk on Twitter earlier this month, when he determined that users would only be able to read a certain number of posts per day due to “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” on the platform.
“In response to the overwhelming demands on the company’s servers from highly aggressive data scrapers, Corp. has placed limits on the number of tweets each user can view on a given day,” according to the filings. Corp. also has limited access to tweets for users who are not logged into their registered Twitter account.
It was not immediately clear whether Twitter had tried to block the offending IP addresses when they were found to have engaged in what the company described as improper data scraping.
“By illegally extracting the data, the defendants blatantly disregard not only the company’s terms of service, but also the privacy preferences of Twitter users,” the filing reads.
A Twitter spokesperson did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. An email to the company’s press email address returned an automated reply with a poop emoji.
— CNBC’s Laura Kolodny contributed to this report.
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