Twitter recently took an extreme step in restricting users from viewing tweets. Elon Musk said “to address extreme levels of data scrapping & system manipulation, the following temporary limits have been applied”
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
Musk stated that this is an important way to stop data scrappers.
He also said the action they are taking against data scrappers all started when Twitter began to restrict users who aren’t logged in to the app from viewing tweets.
Research shows that almost 40% of tweet viewers on the app view tweets without logging into the app with a profile.
Twitter started this new policy to see if it will prompt its users to log in so they’ll be able to see more targeted ads. The issue here is that they don’t log in to the app and this makes twitter loose it’s reach and relevance.
Musk also explained that this was a temporary solution to address this platform misuse.
Data scraping is becoming a prime target because many organizations are all trying to into the generative AI game.
The price of Twitter’s API access was increased and this was mainly made to stop the exploitation of its data.
This is because bigger API access costs have pushed many providers out and most of the tweet data remains visibly available.
This has made lots of developers retrogress to the scrapping route and this is gap twitter is trying to close up with this policy.
This is not deliberate in all regions but a notable portion of Twitter’s 252 million active users per day are doing so without being logged in to a profile.
This could be use to stop them especially accounts being used by scrapers.
This wouldn’t give a permanent solution as scrapers would always find other ways to keep taking Twitter’s data and it’s being noticed that it would also take time to lift all content limits
This might finally end up with Twitter pushing up its walls and stopping tweets access permanently which might impact its position as an important social media platform.
This is a permissible concern but Twitter’s solution doesn’t look achievable. What’s your thought on this?
