The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has placed restrictions on the social media platform in an effort to prevent unauthorized scrapping of potentially valuable data from the Twitter network.
These restrictions limit the number of tweets that users are able to access on a daily basis. On Saturday (July 1), there were reports from thousands of users that they were unable to access the website. Due to the restrictions, users may find that they are unable to use Twitter until the next day after they have scrolled through several hundred tweets.
Since Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in December of last year, he has frequently referred to it as “the world’s digital town square.” However, the website is now forcing users to check in before they can access tweets and profiles, which is a break from its longstanding practice of allowing anybody to browse the conversation on the platform.
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Why did Elon Musk do it?
In a recent tweet, Elon Musk explained that the newly implemented restrictions are a temporary solution that was implemented because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Musk has spoken out against what he refers to as the “misuse” of Twitter data to train well-known artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT. They comb through mountains of information on the internet in order to develop content that resembles human text, photographs, and videos.
Musk provided additional information regarding the restrictions on Saturday, stating that unverified accounts will temporarily be limited to reading only 600 posts per day, whilst verified accounts will have access to reading up to 6,000 messages.
Backlash from Twitter users
After receiving criticism, he announced via Twitter that the verification requirements will be increased to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 posts for confirmed accounts. However, he ultimately decided to lower these requirements to 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.
According to complaints that were registered on Downdetector, a website that monitors online outages, the crackdown started to have rippling effects, which caused more than 7,500 people at one point on Saturday to report difficulty accessing the social media account.
Even though that’s a very tiny number compared to Twitter’s more than 200 million users around the world, the issue was prevalent enough to make the hashtag #TwitterDown trend in some regions of the world.
Musk launched a $8-per-month subscription service for verified accounts earlier this year in an effort to increase Twitter’s revenue, and the higher threshold that is allowed on verified accounts is a component of that service. It has experienced a precipitous decline ever since the billionaire Tesla CEO acquired control of the company and fired almost three-quarters of the workers in an effort to reduce expenses and avoid going bankrupt.
How it has affected Twitter users
Since then, advertisers have decreased the amount of money they spend on Twitter. This is partially due to developments that have allowed for more content that is sometimes cruel and spiky, which offends a larger portion of the service’s population.
Musk just made Linda Yaccarino, a former executive at NBC Universal, his pick for the position of CEO of Twitter in an effort to win back advertisers.
An enquiry from the Associated Press regarding the access issues on Saturday elicited a basic automated response that Twitter delivers in response to the majority of media queries, but it does not answer the matter.