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.
Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 tweets per day. 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.
The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits.
Twitter would “soon” raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said.
Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.
The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.
Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site.
In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.
In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.
It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms, and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.