Twitter has undergone several changes since Elon Musk took over in October last year. Some of these include a paid subscription and 2-factor authentication for paying customers. The company has now brought another change that may have a big impact on users. The social media company is making it mandatory for users to sign in to an account if they want to access tweets on the platform.
Earlier, users could access tweets even if they have not logged into an account. Going forward, those who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an existing account to access tweets. Musk called this change a “temporary emergency measure”.
What Elon Musk has to say<\/span>
Musk said that Twitter data was being scraped which affected the user experience.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” he said in a tweet.
“Several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” the Tesla CEO explained in another.
Embedded tweets affected<\/span>
The move not only blocks users\u2019 unrestricted access but also bars tweets from showing in \u201cmost chat apps\u201d in which they are embedded.
\u201cI’d strongly suggest reconsidering the UX+growth tradeoffs made here (take note how tiktok, youtube, etc, do *not* need this despite much higher b\/w req!)\u201d a Twitter user pointed out.
Musk replied, by saying that this will be \u201cunlocked shortly\u201d and this \u201cdrastic & immediate action\u201d was \u201cnecessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.\u201d
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup\u2019s outrageous valuation,\u201d he added.
This move is believed to be a measure to make it harder for scrapers, like ChatGPT’s web browsing plugin, to take Twitter’s data. Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like ChatGPT maker OpenAI using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward to seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said earlier.<\/div>\n