Elon Musk, the influential CEO of Twitter, announced measures to curb daily tweet readings, in an effort to tackle excessive data scraping by artificial intelligence (AI) firms.

Verified accounts on the platform have seen their reading limits cut to 6,000 tweets per day, while non-verified users can access only 600. Newly minted non-verified accounts face even tighter restrictions at 300 tweets per day.

The decision targets third-party platforms that engage in system manipulation and heavy data scraping, a scenario Musk illuminated in a Saturday tweet. He expressed that hundreds of organizations were scraping Twitter data so aggressively that it hampered the user experience. This move had an immediate impact, driving the hashtag “Goodbye Twitter” to trend across the US post-announcement.

As Twitter’s new regulations began to ripple through its user base early Saturday, complaints soared. A peak of 7,500 people reported difficulties using the social media service on Downdetector, a website tracking online outages. Though it represented only a fraction of Twitter’s 200 million global users, the issue was substantial enough to propel the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in certain regions.

Musk pointed out that the majority of the data scraping was performed by companies building their AI models, causing considerable site traffic issues. He noted that the creation of AI capable of human-like responses often entails feeding them real-life conversation samples from social platforms.

The American billionaire also voiced his displeasure at having to resort to emergency measures, such as bringing a significant number of servers online, just to accommodate AI startups and their high valuations. The impact of Twitter’s strategic action against AI data abuse remains to be seen.

  artificial intelligence, Elon Musk, Twitter, USA