Elon Musk’s X Corp. is suing four unidentified data scrapers accused of “severely tax[ing]” Twitter’s servers and degrading the social network’s user experience. The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far, allegedly “engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter” by “flooding Twitter’s sign-up page with automated requests.”

“The volume of these requests far exceeded what any single individual could send to a server in a given period and clearly indicated that these automated requests were aimed at scraping data from Twitter. These requests have severely taxed X Corp.’s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.’s customers,” the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit, which seeks damages of at least $1 million, was filed last week in Dallas County District Court and reported yesterday by the Dallas-based station WFAA. The defendants are four John Does. Twitter hopes to learn their true identities during discovery.

The lawsuit was filed days after Twitter imposed rate limits on all users. “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,” Musk wrote in a tweet about the lawsuit.

X Corp. may be planning to sue other data scrapers in different geographical areas. The lawsuit said Twitter has identified more IP addresses as data scrapers but is suing these four in Dallas because they were “contracting with entities that maintain data processing facilities in Dallas County.”

X Corp. cites “massive demands” on servers

The lawsuit defines scraping as “a form of unauthorized data collection that uses automation and other processes to harvest data from a website or a mobile application.”

“Scraping interferes with the legitimate operation of websites and mobile applications, including Twitter, by placing millions of requests that tax the capacity of servers and impair the experience of actual users. Twitter users have no control over how data-scraping companies repackage and sell their personal information,” the complaint said.

Twitter prohibits scraping in its terms of service and “employs several technological measures designed to detect and prevent unauthorized scraping.” Noting the recent rate limits, the lawsuit said the “massive demands on X Corp.’s servers from extremely aggressive data-scrapers” led it to impose “limits on how many Tweets each user could view in a given day. X Corp. has also limited access to Tweets for users who are not signed in to a registered Twitter account.”

Twitter doesn’t seem to know exactly what the scraped data was used for, but the lawsuit makes a claim for unjust enrichment and “seeks actual damages from Defendants’ unlawful activities, an accounting, and disgorgement of Defendants’ profits in an amount to be determined at trial.”

Twitter is involved in a large number of lawsuits as both defendant and plaintiff. The company has been hit with more than 20 suits over allegedly unpaid bills for rent and various services, plus lawsuits from ex-employees and executives over unpaid severance, bonuses, and unpaid reimbursements.

Last week, X Corp. sued a law firm that Twitter hired last year after Musk tried to break their $44 billion merger agreement. Musk is trying to claw back $90 million that Twitter paid the firm. Musk’s company also threatened to sue Meta, claiming that it used Twitter trade secrets to build its Twitter rival, Threads.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1953629