Global Courant
Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited the number of tweets users can view each day.
The site now requires people to log in to view tweets and profiles — a change from the old practice of allowing anyone to read the chatter about what Musk has often touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it last year for $ US$44 billion.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for a day after scrolling through hundreds of tweets. Thousands of users complained on Saturday that they could not access the site.
In a tweet on Friday, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “there was so much data looting that it was a humiliating service for normal users!”
To deal with extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation we have applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts up to 600 posts/day
– New unauthenticated accounts up to 300/day
Musk has pushed back on what he calls misuse of Twitter data to train popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. They sift through masses of information online to generate human-like text, photos, video, and other content.
Musk elaborated on the limits on Saturday, saying unauthenticated accounts will be temporarily limited to reading 600 messages per day, while verified accounts will be able to browse up to 6,000.
After facing backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds would be raised to 800 posts for unauthenticated accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts, before later settling for 1,000 and 10,000 tweets respectively.
The crackdown began to have ripple effects, with more than 7,500 people reporting problems using the social media service at one point Saturday, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
While that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million users worldwide, the problem was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to become popular in some parts of the world.
The higher allowed threshold for verified accounts is part of an $8 per month subscription service Musk rolled out earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue. It has fallen sharply since the billionaire Tesla CEO took over the company and laid off about three-quarters of its workforce to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Advertisers have since capped their spending on Twitter, in part because of changes that have allowed for more sometimes hateful and prickly content that offends a larger portion of the service’s audience.
Musk recently hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino as CEO of Twitter to try and win back advertisers.
An Associated Press investigation into Saturday’s access issues led to a crudely automated response that sends Twitter to most media inquiries without addressing the question.
