The boss of the platform announced on Twitter on Saturday that the reading of tweets would be capped daily.
#Twitterdown. Elon Musk announced on Saturday, July 1, that Twitter now restricts the reading of tweets within a set time frame. Concretely, the platform temporarily limits reading to 10,000 messages per day for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified users and 500 for new unverified accounts, said the boss of the social network in a tweet.
This decision aims to “address extreme levels of data collection and system manipulationexplains Elon Musk. Hundreds of organizations (maybe more) were gleaning data from Twitter very aggressively, to the point that it disrupted ordinary usage.” by Internet users, he said in a June 30 tweet.
By limiting the number of tweets that can be read per account, the billionaire seeks to prevent these organizations from collecting the massive amounts of data that are used in particular to develop so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. The decision to limit the number of tweets that can be consulted each day is therefore likely to affect companies competing with that of Elon Musk.
A new spoke in the wheels of AI?
“Almost all the companies that do AI, from start-ups to the largest groups in the world, were collecting large amounts of data”insists the majority shareholder of Twitter. “It’s a bit frustrating to have to urgently add a large number of servers just to justify the indecent valuation of certain AI start-ups”, he added. This decision comes as Elon Musk seeks to increase the profitability of Twitter, since its acquisition of the social network for 44 billion dollars.
However, Elon Musk is not only the boss of Twitter. The tech entrepreneur has also embarked on the race to develop AI. On March 9, the billionaire founded a new company specializing in the field of AI, called X.AI, with the ambition of competing with ChatGPT, the conversational agent developed by OpenAI. However, a few days later, he co-signed a petition calling for a moratorium on the development of AI. The Tesla boss was then accused of playing a double game to try to catch up in the AI sector.
In addition, many users on Twitter have expressed their dissatisfaction with this decision to limit the number of tweets accessible each day. Many of them see this limitation as a new way of pushing users to subscribe to Twitterblue, the paid version of the social network set up by Elon Musk. This, in order to increase the number of consultable tweets per day. In the meantime, dsince the announcement of this limitation, many users share some tips to try to circumvent it temporarily. For example, some claim to use a VPN – a tool that allows you to browse the internet anonymously. Thus, they bypass these restrictions by using software that allows you to change your IP address.