On Saturday, July 1, Twitter CTO Elon Musk announced that the social media platform has temporarily restricted the number of tweets a user can see per day. As per the information provided by Musk via his tweets, Blue Verified users can see up to 10,000 tweets per day, while unverified Twitter users can only see a thousand tweets per day. If a user is new to Twitter, only 500 tweets per day are permitted. The temporary restriction came in view of “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” Musk said.
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
He wrote, “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” after hundreds of users said they were receiving errors on their timeline.
Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Furthermore, he said it was only a temporary emergency measure. In another tweet, Musk said, “Several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively”.
This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
It is rather…
It is believed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies were scraping data from Twitter and other platforms to train language models to power chatbots, which was putting pressure on the resources and creating a bottleneck situation for the actual users. Earlier, Twitter removed access to the timeline without logging in, making it compulsory for users to log in to check what has been happening on the platform.
For those unaware, AI systems like ChatGTP and Google Bard pull a lot of information from the internet, known as data scraping. This data is used to run language models that provide human-like conversations to AI users. Platforms like Twitter, Reddit and others posted in multiple languages provide the necessary structure for the AI to create a human-like chat environment. As AI companies are scraping this data for free, companies like Twitter and Reddit end up paying for the resources without getting anything in return.
In April this year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman expressed his displeasure over the problem of data scraping in an interview with the New York Times. He said, “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” Furthermore, Twitter is taking steps to ensure it is paid for the data. Recently, it started charging users to access application programming interfaces (API), which researchers and third-party apps, including AI companies, use.
Initially, Musk had announced that verified users could see only 6,000 posts per day, followed by 600 for unverified and 300 for new unverified users. Restricting users on how many posts they can see on Twitter may reduce the burden on the servers for the time its engineers come up with a solution. Still, it will definitely affect the ad revenue model of the platform as it will make it difficult for the advertisers to reach the target audience quickly.
In a rather light-hearted sense, Musk retweeted a parody account’s tweet saying the restriction was put in so that Twitter addicts go out.
The reason I set a “View Limit” is because we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside.
— Elon Musk (Parody) (@ElonMuskAOC) July 1, 2023
I’m doing a good deed for the world here.
Also, that’s another view you just used.
Musk’s parody account, which is often confused with the real one, wrote, “The reason I set a “View Limit” is because we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside. I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used.”
