Elon Musk announces limits on tweet reads to reduce massive data use
Elon Musk announced that the platform would temporarily restrict tweet reads, with the aim of reducing massive data usage.
According to Musk, third parties use tweet reads to develop artificial intelligence models.
Twitter limits readings to a maximum of 6,000 messages each day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified users, and 300 for new accounts.
Later, Musk reported that the limits would increase to 8,000, 800, and 400.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
However, Elon Musk did not clarify whether the daily tweet count was applied according to the amount of content that appeared at the start of the app or whether threads or replies were counted.
Thousands of users reported problems accessing Twitter on Saturday, ahead of the tweet limit announcement.
Artificial intelligence collects data on Twitter
According to Musk, the decision was made in light of “extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation”.
A day earlier, the owner of Twitter announced that it would not be possible to read messages on the social network without first logging into a personal account and identifying with oneself.
“Hundreds of organizations (perhaps more) were mining Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point of affecting the actual user experience” said Elon Musk, head of the California-based group.
The limit on the number of tweets that can be read on Twitter seeks to keep organizations collecting data for artificial intelligence models smaller.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the largest corporations in the world, were mining huge amounts of data,” the mogul insisted.
“It’s quite irritating to have to urgently add many servers just to facilitate the outrageous valuation of some AI startups,” he added.
Additional servers were needed so that the social network could support more traffic coming from software or bots and not by users themselves.
More platforms make changes due to AI
Twitter is not the only social network that has made changes due to the explosion in popularity of generative AI.
In mid-June, Reddit announced that it would raise prices for third-party developers who use the platform to gather information for AI models.
Reddit’s decision was not to everyone is liking, as, until the announcement, the platform provided access to the data at modest or even free prices.
