Temporary Restrictions on Twitter Reading: Elon Musk

American billionaire Elon Musk announced temporary restrictions on Twitter reading

American billionaire Elon Musk said in a tweet today, Saturday, that the Twitter platform has imposed temporary restrictions on the reading of messages in order to eliminate “extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation.”

Musk explained that the platform has placed time limits on verified accounts that allow them to read a maximum of 6,000 posts per day, adding that unverified accounts will be allowed to read 600 posts per day, and the maximum limit for new unverified accounts is 300 posts in a day.

Musk stated in another tweet that this number will soon increase to 8,000 posts per day for users with verified accounts, 800 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 400 for new users with unverified accounts. Musk did not provide more details about when the number of publications allowed to be read will be increased.

Musk’s response to the impact on user experience

The move comes after the platform announced it would require users to have accounts on it in order to be able to view tweets, in what Musk called on Friday a “temporary emergency measure.”

Musk said that hundreds of organizations or more are “very aggressively” clearing Twitter data, which is impacting the user experience. Musk has expressed dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, the owner of chatbot ChatGPT, for using Twitter data.

Musk said that “hundreds of organizations (maybe more) are collecting data from Twitter at such an intensity that it interferes with normal use.”

By limiting the number of tweets that can be read, Musk aims to prevent these organizations from collecting vast amounts of data, which are used, in part, to develop generative artificial intelligence models that respond in a human way. To achieve this goal, companies feed these programs with sample conversations.

Twitter and the consequences of generative AI

Twitter had to use additional servers to support the heavy traffic it faced. Twitter is not the only company grappling with the consequences of the rise of generative AI and the development of services based on language models.

In mid-June, Reddit raised the prices it charges third-party developers for using data and conversations posted on the social network.