Credit: Unsplash
Tweet Limit: Calculative Move or Site DDoS
Twitter has implemented temporary restrictions on the number of tweets users can view in a day, according to a tweet by owner Elon Musk. He stated that unverified accounts are now limited to reading 1,000 posts daily, while new unverified accounts are limited to 500 posts. Verified accounts currently have a limit of 10,000 posts per day, although these limits were initially stricter before being revised by Musk within hours of the announcement.
Musk explained that these temporary limits were necessary to address “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” However, he did not provide further details regarding the context of system manipulation. Musk stated that the influx of data scraping was deteriorating the service for regular users, prompting the introduction of this temporary emergency measure. Users were presented with login screens to view Twitter content during this period.
While the exact nature of data scraping is not explicitly defined, it appears to refer to the extraction of large amounts of data utilized by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train language models, which power chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Data scraping involves retrieving information from the internet, and data quality is crucial for chatbots’ success. Reddit and Twitter’s vast collection of billions of posts are considered significant training data for AI companies.
Elon Musk Announces Temporary Cap on the Number of Tweets Twitter Users Can Read Each Day https://t.co/dCS5dj6Cj8
— People (@people) July 1, 2023
However, platforms like Twitter and Reddit have expressed a desire to monetize this valuable data. Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, previously expressed dissatisfaction with how AI companies utilized the platform’s data without compensation. Twitter has already started charging users for access to its application programming interface (API), often utilized by third-party apps and researchers, including AI companies.
Reports from Downdetector, an online outage tracker, indicate that a significant number of UK and US users experienced problems accessing the platform while implementing these limits.
Initially, Musk announced stricter reading limits, including 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts. He later mentioned that numerous organizations were aggressively scraping Twitter data, leading to a strain on the website and the need to bring additional servers online on an emergency basis.
While some experts find the move unusual and potentially affecting Twitter’s advertising revenue, Musk’s decision reflects his aim to prevent the platform from becoming an echo chamber and his ongoing efforts to reshape the platform since acquiring it for $44 billion (£35 billion) last year.
