Popular social media platform Twitter went agog a few days ago when Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk announced a new policy that would limit the daily number of tweets users on the platform could read.
Twitter’s new policy as announced by Elon, meant that users would no longer be able to spend longer hours using Twitter. This new policy was met with heavy backlash from Twitter users as they trended “Goodbye Twitter” on the platform, with many already dropping links to other social platforms like Donald Trump’s Truth Social or Blue Sky.
Elon Musk announced the new policy in a tweet on Sunday afternoon that there will be limits on the daily number of tweets users can read, with thousands of users on the platform noticing problems while trying to access the social media platform.
Elon, also Tesla CEO, added that the verified accounts would also be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts would be able to access just 600 posts a day and new unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
Although Elon Musk didn’t give a timeline of how long this policy would last, he did add much later that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on Twitter without having an account.
Elon Musk also noted that data scraping which was done by firms using it to build AI models was causing traffic issues with the platform, which was needed to create AI which responds in a human-like capacity. Companies relied on real-life conversations which are copied off social media platforms.
“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.
He added that “Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data, It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”
According to an outage tracking website Downdetector.com, about 7,500 users on Twitter reported issues of not being able to access the app during the outage hours at 11:17 AM Eastern Time.
Former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey also reacted to Elon Musk’s announcement made on Saturday. He said “Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense, It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will,”.
He also added in another tweet saying “And I do hope they consider building on truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for all, and critical to preserving the open internet.”.
Although Twitter is not the only platform that has had issues with the increase of the use of AI by companies. Popular community platform Reddit also raised the prices of third-party developers which relied on its data to build AI models in mid-June. This move was also met with backlash as many Reddit users access the platform using third-party platforms and is entirely different from the period when social media data was accessible for free.
