Elon Musk’s recent announcement about Twitter’s decision to temporarily limit the number of tweets users can read per day has attracted attention, including a response from Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey Is. The move is aimed at addressing excessive use of Twitter’s data by artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
And I hope they consider truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostra to help ease some of that burden. Good for everyone, and it’s important to preserve the open internet.
— Jack (@jack) 1 July 2023
Under the new restrictions, verified accounts are limited to reading 10,000 tweets per day, while non-verified users, who make up the majority of Twitter’s user base, are limited to 1,000 tweets per day. New unverified accounts have an even lower limit of 500 tweets. Musk highlighted the need to prevent data scraping and system manipulation by third-party platforms behind these measures.
Following Musk’s announcement, “goodbye Twitter” became a trending topic in the United States, prompting mixed reactions from users. However, Musk didn’t give a specific timeline for how long these limits would be in effect. Significantly, a day before this announcement, Musk had revealed that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on Twitter without an account.
See also: Elon Musk claims Twitter login requirement is just ‘temporary’
The use of social media data by AI firms has been a point of concern, as they rely on it to develop AI models capable of human-like responses. Twitter’s decision to address the data scraping issue mirrors similar actions taken by other social media platforms. In June, Reddit raised prices for third-party developers using its data, sparking controversy among regular users accessing the site through those platforms. This is a departure from the previous practice of providing social media data for free or at minimal cost.
As the AI sector continues to grow rapidly, social media platforms are faced with the challenge of balancing user access with protecting their data from misuse by third-party entities. These recent restrictions reflect ongoing efforts to address this emerging scenario.











