Discontent is brewing amongst the global community as Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform now under Elon Musk‘s stewardship, imposes limitations on unregistered users and curbs overall site access. The purpose? Counteracting purported data scraping.
On Friday, a modification of Twitter’s web interface stopped users from perusing posts without site login. Initial speculation revolved around whether this was an inadvertent glitch or an intentional change by Twitter.
Addressing the chaos
As a wave of complaints hit Twitter, Musk stepped forward, identifying the issue as related to data scraping. Responding to a tweet, he portrayed the move as a “temporary emergency measure,” arguing that excessive data theft from Twitter was disrupting service for regular users.
Adding more context to the situation, Musk replied to Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, alleging that “numerous organizations, possibly several hundreds,” were “scraping Twitter data quite aggressively, to a point that it was diminishing the actual user experience.”
Unraveling the issue
While Musk didn’t elaborate on the nature of the aggressive data scraping, potential culprits could be burgeoning chatbot services like ChatGPT and others.
On the following day, Saturday, Musk came forth with another declaration. He alerted his followers that due to “exceptional degrees of data scraping & system manipulation,” temporary limitations were being enforced.
Imposition of tweet restrictions
Verified accounts, even those prepared to shell out for Twitter Blue, were confined to reading 6,000 posts per day. On the other hand, unverified users have a daily access limit of 600 posts. For new, unverified accounts, this limit drops further to 300 posts per day.
This shift aligns with a time when users are noticing a rate limit on their post access, suggesting a possible related issue.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Do you think Twitter’s new restrictions are necessary or excessive? Please share your views in the comments section below!
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