Elon Musk imposes every day limits on studying posts on Twitter, stopping unauthorized knowledge scraping

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter proprietor Elon Musk has restricted the variety of tweets that customers can view every day — restrictions he described as an try to stop unauthorized scraping of probably invaluable knowledge from the social media platform.

The web site is now requiring individuals to go online to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime apply to permit everybody to peruse the chatter on what Musk has continuously touted because the world’s digital city sq. since shopping for it for $44 billion final 12 months.

The restrictions may end in customers being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling by a number of hundred tweets. Thousands of customers complained Saturday of not with the ability to entry the positioning.

In a Friday tweet, Musk described the brand new restrictions as a brief measure that was taken as a result of “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

To tackle excessive ranges of information scraping & system manipulation, we’ve utilized the next non permanent limits:

– Verified accounts are restricted to studying 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Musk has pushed again on what he calls misuse of Twitter knowledge to coach widespread synthetic intelligence methods like ChatGPT. They scour reams of data on-line to generate human-like textual content, photographs, video and different content material.

Musk elaborated on the boundaries Saturday, saying unverified accounts will briefly be restricted to studying 600 posts per day, whereas verified accounts will be capable of scroll by as much as 6,000.

After going through backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds could be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and eight,000 for verified accounts earlier than later selecting 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.

The crackdown started to have ripple results, inflicting greater than 7,500 individuals at one level Saturday to report issues utilizing the social media service, based mostly on complaints registered on Downdetector, an internet site that tracks on-line outages.

Although that’s a comparatively small variety of Twitter’s greater than 200 million worldwide customers, the difficulty was widespread sufficient to trigger the #TwitterDown hashtag to development in some components of the world.

The increased threshold allowed on verified accounts is a part of an $8-per-month subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this 12 months in an effort to spice up Twitter income. It has fallen sharply because the billionaire Tesla CEO took over the corporate and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to chop prices and stave off chapter.

Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly due to modifications which have allowed extra sometimes-hateful and prickly content material that offends a wider a part of the service’s viewers.

Musk just lately employed longtime NBC Universal government Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO to attempt to win again advertisers.