Last Updated on 1 year by Sophia
Twitter began requiring users to sign in to the service or create an account before allowing them to view posts, which owner Elon Musk called “temporary”.
The service has also introduced a time limit on the number of tweets users can see, with unverified users limited to 1,000 tweets per day. According to Musk, verified users can see up to 10,000 tweets per day.
He said the restrictions were imposed to address “excessive data cleansing and system manipulation”.
Starting Friday, when users click on a link to view a feed or post on Twitter, the platform displays a blank page with a message prompting them to sign in or create an account.
“data stolen”
Embedded messages remain visible on third-party sites, but messages appearing in online searches require a login.
Musk said the move was a “temporary emergency measure” as he sought to prevent third-party bots from collecting data from Twitter.
“We had so much data scam that it was screwing up the experience for regular users!” He tweeted.
Musk has previously criticized AI companies like OpenAI for downloading massive amounts of data from Twitter and other social media platforms to use in training their language models, a sentiment echoed by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. .
But it’s a dramatic change for the platform, considering it has long relied on traffic from the wider internet to generate interest.
temporary emergency measure. We looted the data so much that it made the quality of service worse for the common users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Unexpected change
However, this is less unusual in the context of the erratic and unpredictable changes Musk has made to the site since his acquisition of the site in October.
These include making blue checkmark authentication a paid feature and imposing higher fees for accessing the Twitter API.
Developers using the API, which costs $42,000 to access just 1 percent of tweets, complain that after more than a decade of stability, the tool now crashes frequently, as Mashable reported last week. .
Reddit has also imposed significant API fees in response to data scrubbing by AI companies that led to protests by thousands of subreddits last month, leaving them inaccessible to the general public, some of which were still in the dark as of early July. .