Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter is applying temporary limits on the number of tweets users can read in a single day, a restriction the executive chair said was in response to “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.
The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet, as some users quickly hit their limits.
The crackdown began to have ripple effects early Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people to report problems using social media, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.
“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement.
Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.
The service disruptions cropped up a day after Twitter began requiring people to log on to the service to view tweets and profiles – a change in its longtime practice to allow all comers to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for $44 billion last year.
In a Friday tweet, Musk described the new restrictions as temporary because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” impacting user experience.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
To create AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed the programs examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said.
“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”
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.
The latest restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
The higher threshold allowed on verified accounts is part of an $8 per month subscription service Twitter Blue that Musk rolled out earlier this year to boost Twitter revenue that has fallen sharply since he took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to cuts costs and stave off bankruptcy.
Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly because of changes that have allowed more sometimes hateful and prickly content that offends a wider audience. Musk recently hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino to become Twitter’s CEO to win back advertisers.
