In order to minimise the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence businesses, Elon Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter would temporarily reduce the number of tweets users can access daily.
Musk stated that verified accounts are only permitted to read 6,000 tweets every day on the social media blogging app, adding that the maximum number of tweets that non-verified users, or free accounts, can read in a day is 600. There would be a 300-tweet restriction for new unverified accounts.
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.
According to Musk, Twitter would “soon” increase the daily limit for verified accounts to 8,000, unverified accounts to 800, and new unverified accounts to 400.
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.
In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.
“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 large social media company that is struggling to keep up with the rapidly expanding AI market.
Midway through June, Reddit increased the costs for outside developers who were accessing its data and deleting forum posts.
It was a contentious decision because many regular users also used third-party platforms to access the site, and it signaled a change from prior agreements where social media data was typically offered for free or a minimal fee.