Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced that the platform has implemented a temporary limit on the number of tweets users can read in a day. In a tweet of his own, Musk stated that unverified accounts are now restricted to reading 1,000 posts per day. For new unverified accounts, the limit is set at 500 tweets. Meanwhile, accounts with “verified” status currently have a daily limit of 10,000 posts.
Initially, stricter limits were set, but Musk revised them within hours of the announcement. He explained that the temporary limits were put in place to address “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” However, he did not elaborate on the meaning of “system manipulation” in this context.
Musk further clarified that the measures were necessary due to the excessive data scraping, which was degrading the service for regular users. This move is described as a “temporary emergency measure.”
The exact nature of the data scraping mentioned by Musk is not fully specified, but it appears to refer to the collection of large amounts of data used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train language models that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Data scraping involves extracting information from the internet, and large language models require extensive real human conversations for effective training. Reddit and Twitter, with their extensive repositories of billions of posts, are considered valuable sources of training data for AI companies.
However, platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly seeking compensation for providing access to their data. Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, previously expressed dissatisfaction with how AI companies utilized their data, emphasizing that the value of the Reddit corpus should not be given away freely to large corporations.
Twitter has already started charging users for accessing its application programming interface (API), often utilized by third-party apps and researchers, including AI companies.
There may be additional factors contributing to this move. Musk has been promoting Twitter Blue, the platform’s paid subscription service. It is possible that he is considering a model where users would need to pay for a comprehensive Twitter experience and unrestricted access to posts.
Verified status on Twitter, indicated by a blue tick, was previously granted to high-profile accounts at no cost. However, since Musk assumed leadership, most users are required to pay a monthly subscription fee starting at $8 (£6.30) to obtain verification, irrespective of their profile.
On Saturday, there were reports of users experiencing difficulties accessing the platform in the UK, with approximately 5,126 people reporting problems, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages.