Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently went on the social media platform to say that unregistered data scrapers have been slowing the service down.
Twitter updated its web version on Friday to prevent users from browsing without logging in with an account. Musk responded to concerned tweets, saying that the slowdown was caused by scraping. The Twitter CEO then said it was a ‘temporary emergency measure’ as the platform was getting ‘pillaged so much’ as to affect normal users.
More details followed, with Musk saying that there were hundreds of organizations who were ‘scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively’ to the point that real users’ experiences were compromised. Possible culprits include ChatGPT and other chatbot platforms.
Temporary limits have been put in place, namely limiting the number of posts users could read. Twitter Blue users have 6,000 post limits, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts daily. New unverified accounts were only given 300 posts daily.