Elon Musk revealed on Saturday that Twitter will implement a temporary measure to limit the number of tweets users can access each day.
This step aims to reduce the utilization of the platform's data by artificial intelligence companies. As part of this restriction, verified accounts will be allowed to read a maximum of 10,000 tweets per day. Non-verified users, which constitute the majority of the user base and have free accounts, will have a daily limit of up to 1,000 tweets. Additionally, newly created unverified accounts will be further limited to 500 tweets per day.
The decision was made "to address extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation" by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet on Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits.
"Goodbye Twitter" was a trending topic in the United States following the announcement.
The owner of Twitter did not specify the duration for which these measures would be implemented. Before this announcement, Elon Musk had stated that accessing tweets on the platform without an account would no longer be possible. Musk highlighted that a significant amount of data scraping was being conducted by firms using it to train their artificial intelligence models, to the extent that it was causing traffic problems on the site. To develop AI systems capable of human-like responses, numerous companies rely on feeding their programs with examples of real-life conversations sourced from social media platforms.
"Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,"
Musk said.
"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations, was scraping vast amounts of data."
Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.
In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums. It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.
News Source: Shanghai Daily
