Elon Musk have explained that Twitter would be temporarily restricting how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to clamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies.
The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day.
Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.
New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets.
The decision was made ‘to address extreme levels of data scraping’ and ‘system manipulation’ by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits.
‘Goodbye Twitter’ was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement.
Twitter would ‘soon’ raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said.
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The billionaire owner of Twitter did not specify how long the measures will be in effect.
Musk had previously declared that visitors to the website would no longer be able to read tweets without creating an account.
According to Musk, a lot of the data scraping was being done by businesses that were utilizing it to create their AI models, which was impacting the site’s traffic.
Many businesses feed AI samples of actual social media interactions in order to develop AI that can reply in a human-like manner.
‘Several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,’ Musk said.
‘Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,’ he said.
‘It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.’
Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.
In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.
It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms, and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge. for leadership and is prepared to step up to the challenge.