Social media platform Twitter is temporarily limiting the number of posts users will be able to read per day, after seeing "extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation," according to Chief Executive Elon Musk.
In a July 1 post, Musk saying Temporary limits will see verified accounts limited to 10,000 posts per day, while unverified and new, unverified accounts are capped at 1,000 and 500 posts per day respectively:
Now at 10k, 1k and 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Twitter users have been reporting issues on the platform for the past few days, including the inability to retrieve tweets, missing timelines, and the "limited speed exceeded" message, leading the hashtag #TwitterDown #TwitterFail to be trend in certain jurisdictions.
The real-time outage monitoring website Downdetector has seen thousands of user-submitted reports claiming Twitter outages in the last 24 hours.
France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the east and west coasts of the United States appear to be the most affected regions, according a Is the service down?
Musk did not clarify what may be responsible for extracting the Twitter data and did not elaborate on the root cause behind the "system tampering" claim, but saying that their data was being "looted" so much that it was degrading the service for users.
Some suggest that extreme "data scraping" has been caused by web-browsing-enabled AI chatbots, such as OpenAI's GPT-4.
According To the Twitter developer docs, rate caps are imposed to manage the volume of requests made to Twitter's application programming interface (API).
“These limits help us provide the reliable and scalable API that our developer community relies on,” the document states.
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Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, was one of the few to defend the recent moves in a July 2 statement. mailnoting that "running Twitter is hard" and that the decision was likely made for the good of the platform.
He added that he would like to see Twitter move to a "truly censorship-resistant open protocol" as Bitcoin and Nostra:
And I hope you'll consider developing truly censorship-resistant open protocols like bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for everyone and critical to keeping the Internet open.
—jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
Outside of the office, Musk seems to be training for a potential mixed martial arts cage fighting with fellow billionaire and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg.
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