United States: The Twitter owner Mr. Elon Musk has stated that the social media platform is limiting how many tweets various accounts can read per day in a bid to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
“The restrictions began to have ripple effects early on Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service,” Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, stated.
Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.
Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, initially commented that verified accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts a day. According to the owner, new unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts a day.
Mr. Musk later increased the temporary reading limitation to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
The former CEO described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users.”
Mr. Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
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