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Elon Musks Move To Limit the Number of Viewable Tweets Is Partially Aimed At Combatting ChatGPTs Exploitation of Twitter

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by admin July 03, 2023

Elon Musk Twitter

In a perverse bit of irony, those who've consistently maintained that Twitter is nothing more than a cesspool were the same people expressing outrage this weekend when Elon Musk announced a significant step aimed at curtailing unauthorized data scrapping.

In order to address "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" that were supposedly affecting the overall user experience, Elon Musk announced on Saturday that verified accounts would be temporarily limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day, and new unverified ones to just 300 daily posts.

After a number of revisions, Elon Musk eventually settled on a daily viewability limit of 10,000 tweets for verified accounts and 1,000 tweets for unverified ones. Crucially, new unverified accounts will be limited to viewing just 500 tweets per day for the time being.

Mass data scrapping activities targeting Twitter, as alleged by Elon Musk, pose not only user experience ramifications but also those related to privacy and manipulation of viral trends.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. Back in June, Elon Musk found out for the first time that OpenAI's ChatGPT could access Twitter without any "authorized" API. Apparently, the latest tweet-visibility-limiting moves were partially aimed at halting this unauthorized access.

This theory gains even more weight when one examines the apparent glee with which Elon Musk greeted the news that ChatGPT could no longer pull tweets, as shown in the tweet above.

Of course, this move is having an impact on search visibility and tweet rankings. Bear in mind that Twitter is already working on an update that would place the ability to send unlimited DMs behind a paywall (Twitter Blue).

Elon Musk recently noted that Twitter's user growth has been particularly strong in North America following Ron DeSantis and RFK Twitter Space sessions. On the revenue front, the Wall Street Journal reported recently that around 75 percent of the platform's top 100 advertisers have now resumed their ad-related spending, with 99 percent of ads placed next to brand-safe content, as per a tabulation by the Twitter Sales and Marketing team. Moreover, ad impressions are being limited to verified users only to prevent the bots from "gaming the system."

Written by Rohail Saleem

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