Elon Musk continues to express his concerns about AI companies scraping massive amounts of data from Twitter as he announced new temporary limitations on the number of posts users can read. Unverified accounts will now be restricted to 600 posts per day, while new unverified accounts will only have access to 300 posts per day. Verified accounts, including those obtained through the Twitter Blue subscription or organizational affiliation, will still have a maximum limit of 6,000 posts per day. Musk later tweeted that these rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified accounts.
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These limitations were introduced shortly after Twitter started blocking access for users who are not logged in. Musk justified this action by stating that numerous organizations were aggressively scraping Twitter data, negatively impacting the user experience. These changes are part of Musk’s ongoing efforts to monetize Twitter, including introducing a pay-for-verification scheme through Twitter Blue and hiring a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, to rebuild relationships with advertisers.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
While Twitter’s financial situation is less transparent due to its private status, the hiring of Yaccarino highlights the significance of advertising revenue for the company. However, limiting access to the site contradicts the goal of providing opportunities for advertisers to showcase their paid ad spots. Musk’s focus on his vision of Twitter as a monopoly may be obscuring this fact.
Musk attributes the limitations to companies collecting data for training large language models (LLMs) used in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard. However, he does not mention the significant layoffs that have occurred since he took over the company, which have affected critical infrastructure maintenance. The haphazard nature of these layoffs even led to rehiring some engineers. Concerns have been raised about the stability of Twitter due to the mass layoffs.
In March, Twitter experienced a major outage caused by a change made by a single engineer. The platform also faced issues with unpaid bills to Google Cloud, reflecting a cost-cutting plan aimed at reducing infrastructure expenses by millions of dollars per day.
