Twitter Implements Daily Reading Limits In Response To Data Scraping Concerns
Twitter has taken measures to discourage excessive data scraping and system manipulation by implementing reading limitations on various account types, according to a post by Executive Chair Elon Musk on Saturday.
The move comes as the social media platform looks to enhance user experience and address concerns over the aggressive scraping of Twitter data by numerous organisations.
Initially, verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day. Furthermore, new unverified accounts faced stricter limitations, allowing them to read only 300 posts daily. However, in a subsequent post, Musk stated that the temporary reading limitations were later adjusted to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users. Further details regarding the adjustments were not provided.
The decision to impose reading limits follows Twitter's recent announcement that users would need to have an account on the platform to view tweets—a measure labeled as a "temporary emergency measure" by Musk in a statement on Friday.
Musk expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence firms such as OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, for utilising Twitter data to train their large language models. This dissatisfaction aligns with Twitter's concerns regarding aggressive data scraping practices, which have been negatively impacting user experience.
Coinciding with these developments, Twitter faced a temporary outage on Saturday morning, affecting thousands of users. According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, nearly 7,500 users reported issues with accessing the Twitter app during the peak of the outage at around 11:17 AM ET. It remains unclear whether this outage was related to the measures implemented by Twitter or if it was due to other technical issues.
Twitter has made several efforts to regain advertisers who had departed since Musk acquired the platform. Additionally, the platform aimed to boost subscription revenue by integrating verification checkmarks into the Twitter Blue program.
(Inputs from Reuters)
