If you had trouble using Twitter over the weekend, you aren’t alone.
On Saturday, Twitter began capping the number of posts users could read per day, also known as “rate limiting.” Many nonverified users were initially limited to reading 600 posts per day, while users who purchased Twitter Blue could read 6,000 posts. Later, limits on both types of accounts were increased.
Owner Elon Musk said the rate limits, which he claims are temporary, are meant to fight against companies using Twitter data to develop artificial intelligence programs.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Essentially, Musk says he wants to stop AI companies from scraping Twitter in order to use its content to train their models for free.
The widespread adoption of OpenAI’s virtual chatbot ChatGPT has kicked off something of an AI arms race among large language models. Training those models takes an enormous amount of data, which social media companies have at their disposal.
However, Musk’s explanation might not be the whole story. There are two schools of thought, according to reporting from Forbes and others.
The first involves a previous decision by Musk to prevent users from viewing Twitter when not logged in. This could have created a sort of negative feedback loop where Twitter essentially launches DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against itself, a theory posed by CrownStreet Advisors president Sheldon Chang on the social media platform Mastodon.
Others have pointed out that Musk could have tried to cut costs and stopped paying Twitter’s bills to companies that provide services to the company like Amazon and Google. There is reporting that suggests Musk ultimately paid the company’s Google bill, although the issues users are experiencing are very specific to just be a coincidence, according to Forbes.
It is unclear how long Musk means when he called the move temporary. For now, users will have to be content with reading a finite number of Tweets.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel