Twitter boss Elon Musk recently announced that in order to prevent AI companies from capturing a large amount of Twitter data, affecting the experience of real users, he decided to limit the number of tweets to read.
Now unverified accounts can only read 600 tweets per day, while newly registered unverified accounts can only read 300. Certified accounts (including those that have purchased the $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription service, are certified through an organization or are mandated by Elon Musk) can only read up to 6,000 tweets per day. Elon Musk also said that these limits are “temporary” and will soon be increased to 8,000, 800 and 400.
It is noted that just a day ago, Twitter suddenly started blocking access to anyone who wasn’t logged in, which Elon Musk claims was necessary because “hundreds of organizations (maybe more) are crawling Twitter data so aggressively that it’s affecting the experience of real users.”
This is one of a series of changes Elon Musk has made to the platform since he acquired Twitter last fall. He’s introduced a three-tier API fee system, a Twitter Blue paid authentication service and appointed former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO in an effort to restore relationships with advertisers. We know little about Twitter’s finances as it has become a private company, but Yaccarino’s appointment reflects the importance of advertising revenue to Twitter’s business. However, limiting the number of user tweets read is clearly at odds with the goal of creating more opportunities to show ads.
Elon Musk blames companies that try to acquire data for AI training, such as those that have developed large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Chat and Google Bard. But he failed to mention that he has laid off more than half of his staff since taking over Twitter, including some of the key people who maintain its infrastructure. The rash layoffs led the company to have to rehire even some of the fired engineers, and there were repeated warnings that firing so many would affect Twitter’s stability. A serious outage in March this year was caused by a change made by one engineer.
This comes after Platformer reported that Twitter owed Google’s cloud computing bill for months until recently, reflecting what Reuters previously reported as Twitter’s “deep cuts plan” to try to save millions of dollars a day in infrastructure costs. In an interview last November, a Twitter engineer who asked not to be named said that after the cuts, “things will go wrong more often, they will go wrong longer and the problems will be worse …… There will be some hiccups at first, but as the back-end fixes are delayed, things will build up until people eventually give up.” In the same article, site reliability engineer Ben Krueger says, “I expect to start seeing major public problems with the technology within six months.” Seven months have now passed.
