With AI Tussle, Twitter limits the number of posts users can read

Elon Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter will temporarily limit the number of tweets users can read per day in a bid to curb the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies.

The platform limits the reading of authenticated accounts to 10,000 tweets per day. Unauthenticated users (free accounts, which make up the majority of users) are limited to seeing her 1,000 tweets per day.

New unverified accounts are limited to 500 Tweets.

The decision was made to address “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, with some users quickly reaching their limits, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon. Stated.

In the wake of Musk’s announcement, “Goodbye Twitter” became a trend in the United States.

Twitter’s billionaire owner declined to say how long the measures would be in place.

A day earlier, Musk had announced that without an account, users would no longer be able to read tweets on the site.

Much of the data scraping comes from companies using it to build AI models, to the point of causing traffic problems with the site, Musk said.

To create AI that can respond like humans, many companies feed their programs with examples of real conversations from social media sites.

“Hundreds of organizations (probably more) were scraping Twitter data so aggressively that it impacted the actual user experience,” Musk said.

“From start-ups to some of the biggest companies on the planet, almost every company working on AI was scraping vast amounts of data,” he says.

“It’s pretty frustrating to have to urgently bring a bunch of servers online just to fuel the exorbitant valuations of some AI startups.”

Twitter isn’t the only social media giant to contend with the rapid acceleration of the AI ​​field.

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices for third-party developers who were using their own data and scrutinizing conversations posted on their forums.

This is a controversial move as many general users also access the site via third-party platforms, marking a shift from previous arrangements where social media data was generally provided free or for a small fee. became.