Constant changes in Twitter after Elon Musk bought it

NEW YORK: Ever since billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter there have been constant changes the users are facing. Of late Elon Musk announced “temporary limits” on the number of tweets users are able to read, an announcement that comes amid reports of users having difficulty accessing the site, foreign media reported.

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last October and took the company private, said in a tweet “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits.”

Verified accounts “are limited to reading 6000 posts/day,” while unverified accounts were limited to 600 per day, Musk’s tweet said, adding that new and unverified accounts will have an even lower limit of 300.

About two hours later, he tweeted, “Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.”

Musk added, in what is a suspected trolling comment about all the commotion on Twitter: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”

Then, less than an hour later, Musk sent a subsequent tweet increasing limits to 10,000 for verified, 1,000 for unverified and 500 for new unverified users.

Last week Twitter made a number of abrupt changes reducing the usability of the service. First, the company required users to log in to view the site — previously even people without Twitter profiles could view tweets.

Musk tweeted that “almost every company doing AI” was taking “vast amounts of data” from Twitter, which Musk said was forcing the company to deploy more servers – at a cost – to cope with the demand. Generative AI tools such as chatbots and image generation services are based on large language models (LLM), which are “trained” on vast amounts of data take from internet sites including Wikipedia, Twitter and Reddit.

One expert said using Twitter for LLM training could be problematic for other reasons. “It’s questionable whether we should continue to use data sources like Twitter – the language and sentiment embodied tends to be terse, often confrontational and contains a lot of disinformation,” says Dr Andrew Rogoyski of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey.

“While we as humans know how to filter such data (mostly), training and AI on raw Twitter feeds can lead to problems with the way the AI interacts with people.”

Some users believe the view limitation move is an attempt to encourage Twitter Blue subscriptions – where users can view 10,000 tweets daily. Others believe Twitter could have had capacity constraints forced upon it by suppliers who rent server capacity to the company. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote in a thread on Twitter’s rival Blusky: “It just doesn’t pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login.”

He added: “Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine.”

Data scientist and ex-Twitter employee, Dr Rumman Chowdhury, told the BBC it was unclear if AI organisations had been scraping data from Twitter, but suggested financial issues could be behind the changes.

“Frankly, I think I’m in a majority of people who believe that it’s due to his lack of payment of his bills... and he’s attempting to reduce his costs,” she said.

An Australian project management firm has filed a lawsuit against Twitter in a US court seeking cumulative payments of about A$1m over alleged non-payment of bills for work done in four countries, court filings show.

In May, a former public relations firm filed a suit in a New York court saying Twitter had not paid its bills, while early this year US-based advisory firm Innisfree M&A Inc sued it, seeking about $1.9m for what it said were unpaid bills after it advised Twitter on its acquisition by Musk.

Since Musk bought Twitter he has focused on reducing costs by laying off half the workforce and introducing the subscription service, which offers the sought-after “verified” badge for a monthly fee.

For a platform that requires engagement, limiting posts seems to go in the opposite direction. It is a “very extreme and unprecedented tactic” which is “already failing”, said Dr Chowdhury.

Twitter saw advertisers flee amid worries about Musk’s approach to content moderation rules, affecting its revenue.

Over the weekend, users were hit with “rate limit exceeded” messages after they hit their limit. Some were able to wait a while and refresh their timelines, while others could not view more tweets for the rest of the day.

Initially, using the Twitter-owned TweetDeck product bypassed the limits. As of Monday, users reported issues with accessing their feeds on TweetDeck.

The changes are likely to affect those who use Twitter as a resource to get immediate breaking news.

Up until the last few days, Twitter had still had been largely functional and many users had not been pushed to leave the site.

But as Twitter makes it harder for users to view tweets, a successor may emerge.

One option is Bluesky – launched in February by the former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey. The site had to shut off new sign-ups over the weekend as users began leaving Twitter. New sign-ups were back on as of Monday.

Mastodon was also touted as an alternative to Twitter, and while it has built communities in the months since Musk’s takeover, it has not yet replaced Twitter. However, it has received 85,000 new sign-ups over the past day, according to one tracker site, taking the number of accounts to 13 million. Twitter has more than 250 million users, according to Musk.

It appears that Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is preparing to step in to fill the gap Twitter is leaving, with reports the text-based app Threads or “Project 92” is about to be released imminently.

Screenshots from the app suggest it will look very Twitter-like and allow users to connect with people they follow on Instagram. That would remove one of the biggest hurdles people have had switching from Twitter – finding all the accounts you used to follow.