Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the social network continues to be talked about for issues very different from its main function. This week, in fact, the company behind the social network presented a complaint against four users “John Doe” or four strangers. The complaint was filed in the Texas court. The four strangers, whose IP address is known, have been accused of Illegal “scraping” of Twitter data.
Why Twitter has denounced four strangers
Twitter has detected an anomalous use by the four strangers of the social network and, in particular, of the login page. The users in question were sending a large number of requests to the page, probably with the aim of collect data illegally. This practice risks slowing down social media and is prohibited by Twitter’s terms of service.
For some time now, Twitter has been implementing a series of countermeasures to protect data and improve the user experience. The application of daily reading limits would also be one of the measures taken to combat it scraping. Twitter’s complaint came despite a ruling last year confirming that the public data recovery does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
There will certainly be further developments on this issue. Twitter has already filed the lawsuit in Dallas County and will ask the four as-yet-unidentified users for a compensation of more than $1 million. We will know more in the coming weeks.