Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read per day, to adress data scraping and system manipulation, chief executive, Elon Musk announced on Saturday.
The initial limit was 600 tweets per day for unverified accounts, 300 tweets for new unverified accounts, an 6000 tweets for verified accounts, but then Musk invreased the numbers to 1000 for unverified accounts, 500 to new unverified accounts, and 10,000 for verified accounts.
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Musk also announced on Friday that users will now be required to have an account on Twitter or sign up for one in order to view tweets.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users” said Musk.
The limit is set to address the scraping of large amounts of data used by AI companies to train large language models, used to power chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter want to be paid for the data used by AI companies.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free,” said Steve Hufman, Reddit’s chief executive.
“Several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively,” said Musk.
Twitter has started charging users to access its application programming interface (API), which is used by third party apps and researchers, including AI companies.
Musk, since he acquired Twitter, has been focusing on the social media platform’s aspects that generate profit, with him pushing for more users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, the app’s paid subscription service of eight dollars per month in exchange for a verification check.
Every single aspect of Twitter has gotten considerably worse since Elon Musk took over, from constant bots in DMs and comments to regular app collapses, and there are still people who worship him.
It is impossible to run a social media platform worse than this.
— Zach Lowy (@ZachLowy) July 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, in a tweet.
Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.
— jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Twitter had also experienced an outage on Saturday, with 5,126 people reporting issues accessing the platform in the UK, according to Downdetector.
