Elon Musk announced that there will be limits on the daily number of tweets users can read, as thousands of users reported problems attempting to access the social media site.
"Goodbye Twitter" has been a trending topic on the microblogging site, Twitter in the United States and some other countries following a controversial announcement made by its billionaire owner Elon Musk on Saturday.
Elon Musk announced that there will be limits on the daily number of tweets users can read, as thousands of users reported problems attempting to access the social media site.
In a tweet Saturday afternoon, Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. For unverified accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts a day. New unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
According to Reuters, 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.
To create AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed the programs 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 was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Nearly 7,500 users across the social media platform reported issues with accessing the app during the peak of the outage at around 11:17 AM ET.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification checkmarks a part of the Twitter Blue program.
However, 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.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, reacted after Elon Musk’s announcement on Saturday.
He said; “Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense,” Dorsey tweeted.
“It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will,” he added.
In a second tweet, Dorsey said, “And I do hope they consider building on truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for all, and critical to preserve the open internet.”
Meanwhile, many Twitter users are saying they will move to Truth Social, owned by former U.S. President, Donald Trump as an alternative.