Twitter limits posts that can be read by verified users to 10,000 posts, unverified accounts to 1,000 posts, and new unverified users to 500 tweets per day.
Heaptalk, Jakarta — Twitter plans to limit how many tweets Twitter accounts can read daily. This new policy aims to discourage data scraping and system manipulation concerns.
As delivered by Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, on his Twitter account, “To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we have applied the following temporary limits.”
In more detail, Musk elaborated on the revised usage quotas. He affirmed that verified account holders could initially read the tweets at a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users contend with a drastically reduced limit of only 600 tweets. Furthermore, the new unverified accounts will gain limited access to 300 postings.
About two hours later, Musk corrected his tweet with a new upload. He revised the reading limit was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 500 posts for new unverified users per day.
Musk was not detailed regarding the data scraping. However, it appears the CEO means the scraping of large amounts of data used by Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies to train large language models, which power chatbots, including Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
In simple terms, data scraping is pulling information from the internet. Large language models need to learn from masses of real human conversations. Yet, the quality is critical to the success of chatbot usage. Twitter’s massive trove of billions of posts is hugely important training data that AI companies can use, and platforms like Twitter want to be paid for this data.
Previously, Twitter had also announced it would require users to have accounts on the social media platform to view tweets, a move Musk called a temporary emergency measure. The CEO claimed hundreds or more organizations have been scraping Twitter data aggressively, which can impact user experience.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” Musk explained.
In response to this new policy that Musk declared, Twitter’s former owner, Jack Dorsey, claimed that he does not fully support this new policy. Instead of giving his full support to Musk’s new policy made on Twitter, Dorsey has a robust optimism this step is definitely for the good of the company’s operations.
The social media platform has previously taken several endeavors to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk’s ownership. They are also working to increase subscription revenue by making verified ticks part of the Twitter Blue program. Musk has also issued regulations regarding verified accounts to pay US$, or the equivalent of Rp120,000 per month. However, this effort has sent the company’s stock down sharply since Musk took over the company and laid off about three-quarters of the workforce, which is expected to minimize the company’s operating expenses.
