DALLAS — Elon Musk's X Corp. — the company that owns Twitter — has filed a lawsuit against four people or entities in Dallas County, accusing them of data scraping from the social media platform, which the suit claims is at least partially to blame for the site's recent issues.
This suit comes almost two weeks after Musk imposed limits on the number of tweets users can view each day, which he described as an attempt to slow unauthorized data scraping.
The suit, filed July 6 in the District Court of Dallas County, accuses the four defendants -- identified in the lawsuit by the aliases John Doe 1, John Doe 2, John Doe 3 and John Doe 4, and otherwise only by their IP addresses -- of engaging in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter.
Data scraping, the suit explains, is "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," the suit reads. "The technology used by data scrapers to send massive numbers of requests and to circumvent detection can make online platforms less stable and harm the experience of legitimate users."
The volume of automated sign-up requests from the four defendants' IP addresses, the suit argues, far exceeds what any single person could send to a person and showed these 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 suit states.
The suit argues these actions constitute unjust enrichment at X Corp.'s expense, and that they have damaged X Corp. and the user experience, in addition to the time and money spent investigating the issue.
Per the lawsuit, the claims against the defendants were filed in Dallas County because they allegedly "committed acts... with entities that maintain data processing facilities in Dallas County, Texas... including, on information and belief, unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents."
Adds the suit: "A substantial part of the events or activities giving rise to X Corp.’s claims therefore occurred in or are connected with Texas. Accordingly, this court has personal jurisdiction over Defendants and venue is proper in this court."
In its conclusion, X Corp. asks the court for compensatory damages from the defendants, including the turning over of any profits the defendants may have made, the amount of which would be determined during a trial.
Read the lawsuit in full below.