On Friday, Twitter implemented a temporary change in its access policy so that you must be signed into an account to view the content on the platform in an attempt to block companies from "Data Scraping."
Twitter owner Elon Musk announced new changes to the system in a Tweet. He said, "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, and New unverified accounts to 300/day."
After users began having issues with not being able to tweet, Elon announce he would be increasing the rate limits "soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified."
Before the announcement, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney complained in a tweet about how bad web browsing has gotten. "The internet feels increasingly broken," he said.
"News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled," Sweeney wrote. "Web browsing feels horrible now."
In response, Musk said, "Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience."
"What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas," he added.
Musk noted in response to T(w)itter Daily News that it is a "Temporary emergency measure." He added, "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
Twitter users have begun receiving a message that reads "Rate limit exceeded, Please wait a few moments then try again." One user Katy Faust, the Founder of Them Before Us, joked "Is this God telling me to get off Twitter and go make breakfast?"
According to the Verge, before the change, anyone could view public tweets without being signed into the platform but had limited functionality.
The Washington Post noted that Musk has made previous statements complaining about other organizations using Twitter data to "train" their artificial intelligence without authorization.
Founder of Top Marketing Agency Jeff Sherman told the Post that this change should not affect tweets showing up on Google search engines. Twitter can do what paywall news sites do and allow search engines access to the platform while still blocking users.
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