In AI tussle, Twitter restricts number of posts users can read

A promoted tweet on Twitter app is displayed on a mobile phone near a Twitter logo, in this illustration picture. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration

New York: Elon Musk has announced that Twitter will temporarily restrict how many tweets users can read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence or AI companies.

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users – the free accounts that make up the majority of users – are limited to reading 600 tweets per day. New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets.

The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet, as some users quickly hit their limits.

Twitter would “soon” raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said.

Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place. Musk announced earlier that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account. — AFP