Elon Musk Imposes Daily Limits on Reading Posts on Twitter – Billboard

Twitter proprietor Elon Musk has restricted the variety of tweets that customers can view every day — restrictions he described as an try to stop unauthorized scraping of doubtless precious knowledge from the social media platform.

The positioning is now requiring folks to go browsing to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime follow to permit everybody to peruse the chatter on what Musk has incessantly touted because the world’s digital city sq. since shopping for it for $44 billion final yr.

The restrictions might end in customers being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling via a number of hundred tweets. 1000’s of customers complained Saturday (July 1) of not having the ability to entry the location.

In a Friday tweet, Musk described the brand new restrictions as a brief measure that was taken as a result of “we have been getting knowledge pillaged a lot that it was degrading service for regular customers!”

Musk has pushed again on what he calls misuse of Twitter knowledge to coach common synthetic intelligence programs like ChatGPT. They scour reams of knowledge on-line to generate human-like textual content, pictures, video and different content material.

Musk elaborated on the limits Saturday, saying unverified accounts will briefly be restricted to studying 600 posts per day, whereas verified accounts will have the ability to scroll via as much as 6,000.

After going through backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds can be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and eight,000 for verified accounts earlier than later deciding on 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.

The crackdown started to have ripple results, inflicting greater than 7,500 folks at one level Saturday to report issues utilizing the social media service, based mostly on complaints registered on Downdetector, a web site that tracks on-line outages.

Though that’s a comparatively small variety of Twitter’s greater than 200 million worldwide customers, the difficulty was widespread sufficient to trigger the #TwitterDown hashtag to development in some components of the world.

The upper threshold allowed on verified accounts is a part of an $8-per-month subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this yr in an effort to spice up Twitter income. It has fallen sharply for the reason that billionaire Tesla CEO took over the corporate and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to chop prices and stave off chapter.

Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly due to modifications which have allowed extra sometimes-hateful and prickly content material that offends a wider a part of the service’s viewers.

Musk not too long ago employed longtime NBC Common government Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO to attempt to win again advertisers.

An Related Press inquiry about Saturday’s entry issues triggered a crude automated reply that Twitter sends to most media queries with out addressing the query.