In an effort to prevent unauthorized scraping of valuable data from the platform, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has imposed daily limits on the number of tweets users can view. This marks a significant departure from Twitter’s longstanding practice of allowing unrestricted access to tweets and profiles. Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year, now requires users to log in to view content on the social media platform.
Under these new restrictions, users may be locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through a few hundred tweets. This change has resulted in numerous complaints from users who have been unable to access the site. Musk clarified that these restrictions are temporary and were implemented due to excessive data scraping, which was degrading the service for regular users.
Musk has expressed concerns about the misuse of Twitter data for training artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. These systems rely on vast amounts of online information to generate human-like text, photos, videos, and other content. To address these concerns, Musk has set limits on the number of posts unverified and verified accounts can read per day.
Initially, unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts, while verified accounts could scroll through up to 6,000. However, in response to backlash, Musk raised the thresholds to 800 and 8,000 tweets, respectively, before settling on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets.
The implementation of these restrictions had a widespread impact, with over 7,500 individuals reporting problems using Twitter at one point, according to complaints registered on Downdetector. Although this number is relatively small compared to Twitter’s global user base of over 200 million, it was significant enough for the hashtag #TwitterDown to trend in certain regions.
Elon Musk implemented a higher threshold for verified accounts as part of a subscription service costing $8 per month. This move aimed to increase Twitter’s revenue, which has experienced a significant decline since Musk acquired the company. To cut costs and avoid bankruptcy, Musk made the difficult decision to lay off a substantial number of employees. Furthermore, Twitter has faced reduced advertising spending due to the platform’s allowance of offensive content, resulting in the alienation of a larger portion of its user base.
To address these challenges, Musk recently appointed Linda Yaccarino, a former executive at NBC Universal, as Twitter’s CEO in an attempt to regain the trust of advertisers.
When the Associated Press inquired about the access problems experienced on Saturday, they received a generic automated reply from Twitter that did not address the specific question.
