According to Mr. Musk’s tweet, unverified accounts are currently restricted, allowing them to view a maximum of 1,000 posts in a single day.
Newly created unverified accounts can only view up to 500 posts per day, while verified accounts can access up to 10,000 posts daily.
Initially, the wealthy tech guru implemented more severe restrictions, however, he ultimately altered them within a few hours of making the announcement.
According to Mr. Musk, the limited access for a limited time was implemented to deal with the highly excessive instances of data scraping and manipulation of the system.
In this context, he did not clarify the meaning behind “system manipulation”.
After Twitter users were presented with login prompts to view content, Mr. Musk explained on Friday “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,”
The decision was labeled as a short-term solution to an urgent issue.
The exact meaning behind “data scraping” as it pertains to Mr. Musk’s recent statements is somewhat ambiguous, but it seems to suggest the gathering of significant quantities of data utilized by organizations specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) to train big language models that fuel chatbots such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Data scraping means extracting information from the internet. For chatbots to learn from lots of real human conversations, large language models are necessary. Quality is crucial for chatbots to be successful. AI companies use the enormous trove of billions of posts available on Reddit and Twitter as critical training data.
But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be paid for this data.
In an interview with the New York Times in April, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, expressed his discontent with the activities of AI companies.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” he said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Twitter has begun to charge individuals to access its API (application programming interface), which is commonly used by third-party applications and researchers- including AI companies.
There are also other possible explanations for this decision.
Elon Musk has been encouraging individuals to subscribe to Twitter Blue, the platform’s paid subscription service. It is conceivable that he is considering a model where users will need to pay to access a complete Twitter experience, including unlimited posts.
Before Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter, the platform provided “verified” status to prominent accounts for free, indicated by a blue tick. However, now, most users must subscribe and pay a monthly fee starting at $8 (£6.30) to obtain verification, regardless of their profile.
At 16:12 BST on Saturday, the website Downdetector, which monitors online service disruptions, recorded a high of 5,126 individuals reporting difficulties in accessing the platform in the UK.
Around the same time, roughly 7,461 individuals in the US reported malfunctions.
Initially, Elon Musk introduced reading restrictions for verified and unverified accounts on Twitter. Verified accounts were limited to 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts to 300 posts per day.
In a subsequent update, Elon Musk mentioned that “several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively”.
Afterward, he expressed that “rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis”.
A server is a robust computer that handles and saves data while delivering services such as web pages to clients.
Adam Leon Smith, a representative from BCS (the UK’s professional organization for IT), found the decision “quite peculiar” as reducing users’ scrolling time would impact the company’s ad earnings.
Mr. Musk acquired the corporation for $44 billion (£35 billion) in a long and complicated transaction last year. During this time, he was highly critical of Twitter’s earlier management and made it clear that he didn’t want the platform to turn into an echo chamber.
Shortly after assuming control, he reduced the number of employees from roughly 8,000 to approximately 1,500.
In an interview, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy.
The company’s decision to include engineers in the layoffs raised concerns about the stability of the platform.
However, in an interview, Mr. Musk admitted to encountering some glitches but assured that any outages were brief and that the site was functioning properly.
