BY STACY ODHIAMBO
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has implemented limits on the number of tweets users can view each day. He has done this in order to prevent unauthorized scraping of valuable data from the platform.
Previously, Twitter allowed everyone to browse tweets and profiles without logging in, but now users must log in to access this content. As a result of the restrictions, users may be locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through a few hundred tweets.
On Saturday, numerous users complained about not being able to access the site.
Musk explained in a tweet on Friday that these restrictions are temporary and were implemented because excessive data scraping was degrading the service for regular users.
Musk is concerned about the misuse of Twitter data to train AI systems like ChatGPT, which generate human-like text, images, and videos.
On Saturday, Musk provided further details about the limits, stating that unverified accounts will temporarily be restricted to reading 600 posts per day, while verified accounts will be allowed to scroll through up to 6,000 posts.
However, due to backlash, Musk raised the threshold to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts. Eventually, he settled on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.
Implementing these restrictions had a widespread impact, with over 7,500 people reporting issues with using Twitter on Saturday, as documented by complaints on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. While this number is relatively small compared to Twitter’s global user base of over 200 million, the problems were significant enough to make the hashtag #Twitter downtrend in some regions.