Published by: Sanstuti Nathan
Last updated: Jul 02, 2023, 12:21 PM IST
New York, United States of America (USA)
New unauthenticated accounts would be limited to 500 tweets (Image: News18)
The billionaire owner of Twitter gave no timeline for how long the measures would be in place
Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily limit how many tweets users could read per day in an effort to crack down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies.
The platform limits verified accounts to reading 10,000 tweets per day. Unauthenticated users – the free accounts that make up the majority of users – are allowed to read a maximum of 1,000 tweets per day.
New unauthenticated accounts would be limited to 500 tweets.
The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly reached their limits.
“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States after Musk’s announcement.
The billionaire owner of Twitter gave no timeline for how long the measures would be in place.
The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.
Much of the data being scraped came from companies using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point of causing traffic problems for the site.
To create AI that can respond in a human-like way, many companies feed the programs examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.
“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) have been extremely aggressive at scraping Twitter data, to the point where it impacts the real user experience,” Musk said.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, collected massive amounts of data,” he said.
“It’s kind of creepy to have to bring large numbers of servers online in an emergency just to allow for the outrageous valuation of an AI startup.”
Twitter is not the only social media giant to contend with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.
In mid-June, Reddit raised prices for third-party developers using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.
It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site through third-party platforms, and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data was generally provided for free or for a small fee.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed – AFP)
