New York:  In a recent development, Twitter has implemented temporary restrictions on the number of tweets users can read per day.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, announced that verified accounts are limited to reading 10,000 tweets per day, while non-verified users are limited to 1,000 tweets per day. New unverified accounts have a limit of 500 tweets. These measures are aimed at addressing data scraping and system manipulation by third-party platforms, particularly AI companies.

The decision was prompted by the excessive levels of data scraping occurring on Twitter, where firms were aggressively scraping vast amounts of data to build their AI models. This practice was causing traffic issues on the platform and interfering with the user experience. Musk expressed frustration at the need to allocate additional servers to accommodate AI startups' data scraping activities, which led to inflated valuations.

Musk did not provide a specific timeline for how long these restrictions would be in place. However, it is worth noting that Twitter had previously announced that reading tweets on the site would require an account, a move made to address privacy concerns.

Twitter is not the only social media platform grappling with the challenges posed by the AI sector's rapid growth. Reddit, for instance, recently increased prices for third-party developers utilizing its data and collecting discussions from its forums. This move sparked controversy as it deviated from the previous practice of providing social media data either for free or at a minimal charge.

Overall, these restrictions by Twitter and similar actions taken by other social media platforms reflect the growing need to regulate and manage the use of data by AI companies while balancing the interests of regular users and maintaining a healthy online environment.