Chaos returned to Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter over the weekend when users began to notice they could no longer view content on the social media platform unless they were logged into their accounts.
Initially many assumed the glitch was down to a technical problem – it wouldn’t be the first since Twitter’s new owner took the company over last year and promptly set about cutting the workforce from around 8,000 staff to about 1,500 – however Musk himself later took to the platform to explain that the new restrictions were an attemot to combat “data scraping” on the platform:
Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.
What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
On Saturday evening, Musk elaborated, explaining that the site would ‘temporarily’ restrict the number of posts users were allowed to read to 300 for new unverified (free) accounts, 600 for existing unpaid accounts and 6,000 posts for paying users – these figures were later expended to 500, 1,000 and 10,000:
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: – Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day – Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day – New unverified accounts to 300/day — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Musk did not indicate how “new” an account needs to be to qualify for the lower quota, nor how “temporary” the measure would be.
By “data scraping” Musk appears to be referring to the practice of bots harvesting information from posts on the site in order to feed large language AI models such as ChatGPT, although whether his objections relate to the principle of data harvesting, or the fact the bots don’t currently pay for the pleasure is unclear.
It’s certainly an interesting move from the tech guru. Musk downgraded the value of the social media giant he bought for $44m by around half earlier this year, while the New York Times reported in June that ad revenues on the platform had fallen by 59 per cent since Musk’s takeover, with many advertisers concerned over Musk’s governance of Twitter.
The latest move to restrict how much content – and by extension advertising – users will be able to see is unlikely to endear the site further to potential advertisers.
