Elon Musk, the individual who owns Twitter, has introduced fresh restrictions on the quantity of tweets that users are able to view within a single day. He asserts that these limitations are intended to thwart the unauthorized extraction of valuable data from the platform. Due to this alteration, Twitter now requires users to authenticate in order to access tweets and profiles, signifying a deviation from its previous strategy of allowing unrestricted public entry to the platform. This alteration comes after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion last year, and it has received mixed reactions from users.
With the implementation of the recent limitations, users may encounter a situation where they are unable to access Twitter if they engage in scrolling through several hundred tweets within a single day. This led to a significant influx of grievances during the weekend from countless users who conveyed their exasperation regarding the incapacity to establish a connection with the website. Musk addressed the situation in a tweet on Friday, explaining that the limitations are temporary and were implemented due to excessive data scraping, which was negatively impacting the service for regular users.
Musk has openly expressed his apprehensions concerning the improper utilization of Twitter data in the training of artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT. Such AI systems heavily depend on a vast quantity of online data to produce text, images, videos, and other forms of content that closely resemble human-generated output. In order to provide additional specifics regarding the limitations, Elon Musk clarified that unverified accounts will have a temporary restriction allowing them to read up to 600 posts per day, while verified accounts will have the ability to scroll through a maximum of 6,000 posts.
Following the negative response, Musk subsequently raised the thresholds to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 posts for verified accounts.. This adjustment aimed to address user concerns and strike a balance between data protection and user experience.
The impact of these restrictions was significant, with over 7,500 users reporting difficulties accessing Twitter at one point during the weekend, according to complaints registered on DownDetector, an online outage tracking website. While this number may be relatively small compared to Twitter’s vast user base of over 200 million worldwide users, the issue became widespread enough to make the #TwitterDown hashtag trend in some regions.
The higher tweet limit for verified accounts is part of a subscription service priced at $8 per month ($12) introduced by Musk earlier this year. The objective of this service is to increase Twitter’s revenue, which has declined significantly since Musk took over the company. To cut costs and avoid bankruptcy, Musk had to lay off a substantial portion of the workforce. However, these changes, which allowed more contentious and offensive content, have also led to a reduction in advertiser spending on the platform.
To address these challenges, Musk recently hired Linda Yaccarino, a longtime NBC Universal executive, as Twitter’s CEO. The appointment of Yaccarino aims to win back advertisers and restore confidence in the platform. When the Associated Press inquired about the access problems experienced on Saturday, they received a generic automated reply from Twitter that fails to address the specific question posed by the media.
