Elon Musk stated on Saturday that Twitter will temporarily limit the number of tweets users could see every day, in an effort to limit the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence firms.
Twitter has set a restriction of 6,000 tweets read per day for verified users. Non-verified users, or free accounts, which account for the vast majority of users, are limited to reading 600 tweets every day.
New unverified accounts would have a tweet limit of 300.
Musk stated in a tweet on Saturday that the decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, as certain users quickly reached their limitations.
Some of the topics that are trending in Nigeria as a result of Elon Musk’s decision are ‘GB Twitter’ and ‘Rate Limit Reached.’
Musk did not give a timeline for how long the limit would be in place.
He had announced on Friday that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.
“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”
