By Andrea Hargraves 
Twitter is temporarily limiting the number of posts its users can see per day. Those who pay to use the platform can consume more content. Anyone who is not registered on the platform is strictly prohibited from entering location (Unless, of course, you create an account). The information was announced on Saturday by Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, after several users reported difficulties using the network. The exact number of posts that different users had access to varied over the course of a Saturday – between 600 and 10,000.
Elon Musk maintains that change is not permanent. The goal is to combat the automated collection of large amounts of data (data scraping, in English). The fact that Twitter is, by default, an open platform allows you to easily extract fresh and updated data in real time. This is very useful for trend analysis and studies of social events or phenomena. The platform’s data can also be used to train large language models that support AI systems like ChatGPT — something Musk, who helped launch the creators of ChatGPT OpenAI, has criticized in the past.
To deal with extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation, we have imposed the following temporary limits: Verified accounts [pagas] It’s limited to reading 6,000 messages a day,” Musk explained, in a brief message subscriber on Twitter on Saturday afternoon. At the time of publication, unverified accounts were capped at 600 messages per day. Newly created accounts, which have not been paid, have a maximum of 300 messages.
On Friday, Musk warned that “several hundred organizations” would “extract data from Twitter very aggressively, to the point of affecting the real user experience.”
The fact that the platform is based on a small team of engineers doesn’t help. Since Musk finalized the Twitter purchase in November, the CEO has laid off more than half of the company’s workforce in an effort to cut costs.
And by the end of Saturday, the number of publications of users with a subscription had already been increased to 10 thousand. Those who do not pay, but have an account on the site, have access to a thousand.
Franchise that pays
The latter restrictions end up favoring users who pay to use Twitter, who, in addition to being able to edit what they write and get more fame on the platform, can also consume more content. Musk, for his part, will benefit from increasing the number of subscribers: according to the data he obtained The New York TimesAnd Twitter’s revenue between April and May this year fell 59% year-over-year, with many advertisers abandoning the platform due to loosening restrictions on the content allowed on the site. location.
Musk, who considers himself a tyrant of free speech, says he decided to buy the social network Twitter in 2022 to ensure space, Connected, to share ideas without filtering. “My gut tells me that having a public platform that inspires trust and is inclusive is incredibly important to the future of civilization,” he announced hours after announcing the Twitter purchase, onstage at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Canada.
But the task was complicated. According to testimonials shared with The New York TimesAdult content, which is allowed on Twitter, has become a concern for the company’s sales team. For example, during Mother’s Day campaigns, keywords like “momlife(A Mother’s Life, in English) was linked to pornographic videos.
Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Iaccarino, who inherited Elon Musk’s former role in early June, is one of the new minds trying to solve the problem.
In the long term, Elon Musk hopes to use Twitter to create X, a “super app” for everything (paying bills, exchanging messages, buying flights), which he should compete with. program Chinese WeChat. Without advertisers and users, it would be difficult.
Revised (11:19 p.m.) to include new posting limits announced later on Saturday.