After announcing the newest restriction access to Twitter, owner Elon Musk announced that this drastic and immediate action was done to fight companies that run artificial intelligence, preventing them from stealing data.
Blaming AI for New Restriction
Twitter issued a lot of updates recently, including the requirement to sign up to view tweets and restricting tweet previews when links were shared with others. But according to a report from The Verge, the platform will also now temporarily limit how many tweets users can read per day in an effort to address data scraping and system manipulation.
Owner Elon Musk continuously blames AI companies training large language models for this aggressive scrapping of Twitter data, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard. This will make sure that the platform will not be at risk of becoming hellscapes with some still don't have an authentication process.
As an immediate reaction, the platform had to fire backup servers to cope with the increased traffic on site. He added, "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." This decision was also met with confusion as to how sudden the happening was.
Limiting Users for Tweet Viewing
Business Insider reported that Twitter will now limit people from viewing tweets to a certain number. Unverified users will only be able to see 600 posts per day while new unverified users will see 300 posts in a day.
Meanwhile, verified users will still be able to continue reading tweets with a maximum of 6,000 posts per day through a Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification from Musk himself like what he did to Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone with more than a million followers.
It all remains unclear for Twitter on how they will count a post as read whether it will mean just scrolling past a tweet or actually interacting with the tweet. Despite these changes, all of the outcomes will cause users from the platform to have problems seeing new tweets on their feeds.
As per The Sun, no timeline was also given by Musk or other employees regarding how long the measures would be in place.
When Epic Games Chief Executive Office Tim Sweeny stated in his tweet the platform was walled and that browsing the site feels horrible, Musk responded asking him what should we do to stop that, and is open to ideas.
The internet feels increasingly broken. News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled. Web browsing feels horrible now.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 30, 2023
As a suggestion, Sweeny states that scrapping Twitter's terms of service and taking legal action against companies is the perfect response.
