Twitter restricts tweets users can see, Elon Musk announces

Social media company Twitter has limited the number of posts users will be allowed to read on the popular platform.

In another dramatic change, owner Elon Musk said Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day.

Limited posts

In a tweet, the South African-born owner of Space X and Tesla said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 1 000 posts a day.

For new unverified accounts, the number is 500. Meanwhile, accounts with “verified” status are currently limited to 10 000 posts a day.

Musk’s announcement has outraged Twitter users with #RIPTwitter trending on the platform.

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Data scraping

Musk said the temporary limits on the social media platform were to address “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.

The move was described as a “temporary emergency measure”.

The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.

The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.

AI

Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site, according to an AFP report.

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.”

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