As Twitter experienced widespread outages, the social media platform announced there would be temporary restrictions.
Saturday morning, thousands of accounts could not be accessed, Fox News reported.
The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, tweeted that Twitter was instating “temporary limits” on the app amid what he described as malicious use of the platform.
“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” Musk wrote.
“Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; New unverified accounts to 300/day,” Musk explained.
These new measures, which include a temporary requirement to have an account to view tweets are the latest in Musk’s campaign against data scraping and platform manipulation.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” the billionaire wrote.
The reason for the change is due to the hundreds of organizations that were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” impacting user experience. Musk called out artificial intelligence companies as well.
“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’s outrageous valuation,” he said in a tweet.
