Elon Musk has Friday and Saturday announced new measures on Twitter for so-called scrapers to counteract; companies that extract large amounts of data from their website. The most striking: users are only allowed to see a limited number of tweets per day. Six thousand for paying Twitter users, three hundred and six hundred for new and existing non-paying users. He has also ended the possibility for people without a profile to take a look at the site.
Musk says it is a temporary emergency measure. Shortly after the announcement of the cap on the number of tweets per day, he reported that those numbers will be increased by a third ‘soon’, without specifying when.
According to Musk, the interventions are necessary to keep the social medium accessible to its users, amid “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”. Earlier, according to news agency Reuters, Musk had already expressed his displeasure with artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter data to train their language models to generate automatic texts. Musk did not say on Saturday whether the scraping he is now taking measures against comes from these types of companies.
On Saturday, thousands of Twitter users reported that they were unable to use the platform properly. The hashtag #TwitterDown became trending in several countries. Whether this is still the result of the stalling due to the large-scale scraping that Musk is campaigning against or the result of his new restrictive measures is as yet unclear.