Twitter introduced tweet-reading rate limits to address extreme levels of data scraping, Elon Musk reaffirmed on Thursday, in reply to a tweet that said the social media company has filed a lawsuit against four entities in Texas for data scraping.

"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 said.

However, the Twitter owner did not confirm or deny that a lawsuit had been filed. Reuters could not immediately verify if a lawsuit had been filed.

Musk has previously blamed data scraping for his move to limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read.

Twitter has said only a small percentage of people using the platform have been affected by the limits.

"To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform," the company said in a blog post last week.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.

(Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)