Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, has filed a lawsuit against four entities in Texas for engaging in data scraping.

Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, has filed a lawsuit against four entities in Texas for engaging in data scraping.

Twitter has issued a warning to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, stating its intention to take legal action. Twitter alleges that Meta has employed former Twitter staff members who had access to proprietary information and confidential trade secrets.

According to a report from WFAA, an ABC-affiliated TV station, Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unidentified entities in Texas for engaging in data scraping. The lawsuit claims that these entities were responsible for an excessive volume of automated sign-up requests originating from their IP addresses. This relentless activity placed a significant burden on Twitter's servers, prompting the social media platform to impose daily limits on the number of tweets a user can read.

The lawsuit was reportedly submitted to the District Court of Dallas County in Texas on July 6. However, Reuters was unable to independently verify the filing, and Twitter has yet to respond to Reuters' request for comment outside of regular business hours.

Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, has attributed the need for tweet limits to the issue of data scraping. He emphasized this explanation in response to a tweet that mentioned the data scraping lawsuit. Musk acknowledged that several entities attempted to scrape a vast number of tweets within a short timeframe, necessitating the implementation of rate limits. However, he neither confirmed nor denied the existence of a filed lawsuit.

Interestingly, Musk's decision to impose limitations on tweet consumption occurred just prior to the launch of Meta Platforms' Threads app, which directly competes with Twitter. Threads achieved a remarkable milestone by amassing over 100 million sign-ups within its first five days of release.

In addition to its data scraping lawsuit, Twitter has also threatened legal action against Meta, accusing the company of hiring former Twitter employees who possessed insider knowledge of trade secrets and other sensitive information.