Elon Musk made an announcement on Saturday regarding temporary restrictions on the number of tweets users can read per day on Twitter.
The purpose of this move is to limit the utilization of Twitter’s data by artificial intelligence companies.
The restrictions entail that verified accounts can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, while non-verified users, who comprise the majority of Twitter users, are limited to 600 tweets per day. New unverified accounts have a limit of 300 tweets.
Musk stated in a tweet on Saturday afternoon that these measures were implemented to address the significant levels of data scraping and system manipulation by third-party platforms.
Musk also mentioned that Twitter intends to raise the limits in the near future. Verified accounts may be allowed to read up to 8,000 tweets per day, while unverified accounts could have a limit of 800 tweets per day.
New unverified accounts might have a cap of 400 tweets per day. However, Musk did not provide a specific timeline for how long these restrictions will remain in place.
The day before this announcement, Musk had stated that reading tweets on Twitter without an account would no longer be possible.
Musk explained that a significant portion of data scraping came from firms using it to train their AI models. The excessive scraping was causing traffic issues on the site.
Many companies, ranging from startups to large corporations, collect vast amounts of data from Twitter to develop AI models capable of human-like responses.
Musk expressed frustration at having to allocate a large number of servers on an emergency basis to facilitate the data scraping practices of AI startups, which he believed led to their inflated valuations.
The rapid growth of the AI sector has presented challenges not only for Twitter but also for other social media platforms. In mid-June, Reddit increased prices for third-party developers using its data, particularly those extracting conversations from its forums.
This move caused controversy as regular users who accessed Reddit through third-party platforms were affected. It marked a departure from previous arrangements where social media data was generally provided for free or at a minimal cost.
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