Twitter Restricts the Number of Posts that Users Can View, Causing Disruptions for Some Users

Twitter began limiting the number of posts that users can read on its platform, an unusual move that came as owner Elon Musk vowed to fight companies attempting to use its data to develop artificial intelligence software.

Musk detailed the temporary changes on Saturday, which included restricting unverified accounts to 600 posts per day while verified accounts — those who pay a monthly subscription — can peruse 6,000 posts per day. Later, he announced multiple increases to the permitted number of posts.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, the following temporary restrictions have been implemented,” Musk tweeted.

Saturday morning, according to Downdetector, which monitors website outages, thousands of users reported difficulties with the site prior to his tweet. Some users reported receiving “rate limit exceeded” error messages when attempting to access the site. This term was prevalent on Saturday afternoon on the platform.

The decision to prevent Twitter’s own users from reading on the platform is a result of Twitter’s intensifying efforts to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) companies from scraping the site for free training data.

The success of OpenAI’s virtual chatbot ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s substantial investment to gain early access to the generative AI technology, has piqued the interest of entrepreneurs and investors seeking to accelerate their development in the space. This has exacerbated tensions with social media companies that possess vast quantities of data that can be utilized to train these systems.

Musk tweeted on Friday that “virtually every AI company, from startups to some of the world’s largest corporations, was scraping vast amounts of data.” “It is rather insulting to have to bring a large number of servers online in an emergency to facilitate the outrageous valuation of some AI startup,”

Twitter users noticed new efforts by the company to make such activities more difficult by requiring web users to be enrolled into the site in order to view website posts.

“Temporary precautionary measure. We were experiencing such a high level of data theft that it was affecting the quality of service for normal consumers! Friday, Musk announced the decision. He later added, “Hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations were scraping Twitter data so aggressively that it negatively impacted the actual user experience.”

Social-media platforms can be a treasure trove for the large language models that enable AI chatbots, as they contain vast quantities of the types of verbal interactions that these systems are attempting to learn. Other social media platforms have also implemented new policies in response to the rise of data-hungry AI firms.

Reddit has received criticism for its decision to charge some third-party developers to access its data.

“Reddit must become a self-sustaining business, and in order to do so, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in a post on the platform last month.

Since assuming control of Twitter in late October, Musk has aggressively sought to improve the company’s use and monetization of user data. These efforts have included restricting the use of Twitter’s application programming interface (API), which enables third parties to analyze some of Twitter’s data and develop tools with it.

As part of Musk’s efforts to increase Twitter’s revenue, API access has become more expensive.

In a letter sent in May, Twitter accused Microsoft of unlawfully using its API data, stating that Microsoft had been using the data for free and was now refusing to pay for it. Musk has charged Microsoft with “illegally using Twitter data” for training purposes.

Microsoft stated at the time that it would assess the situation and respond as necessary.

Twitter has been working to improve its subscription service, which includes the verification of users, in addition to increasing its data pricing. With the change on Saturday, verified users will be able to read more than unauthenticated users. Musk’s new rules initially stated that newly unverified users will be restricted to perusing no more than 300 posts per day, but this number has since been increased multiple times.

As far as I am aware, this is unprecedented since the advent of internet bulletin boards. Former Twitter executive Jason Goldman, who has been critical of Musk’s management, commented on the limits. Setting limits so low that they render the site unusable for average users is just the latest example of the new ownership’s exclusively extractive strategy.

On Saturday, as the implications of Musk’s data dispute became apparent, some users complained about being restricted.

One Twitter user tweeted, “Your addiction is about to end.” Everyone will be liberated. We’ll see you at the park.”

“Touch grass again,” Musk responded via Twitter.