Twitter Implements Usage Limits for All to Combat Data Scrapers

Never a dull day at Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter 2.0’, at the same time as we head into an extended weekend.

Today, Twitter has taken the acute step of essentially restricting users from viewing tweets, in an effort to handle what Elon describes as ‘extreme levels of information scraping’.

As outlined on this tweet, to be able to address data scraping concerns, Twitter has restricted each verified and unverified usage at different thresholds, which Musk says is a vital step to stop data scrapers.

Go over the boundaries and also you’ll see this message:

Twitter has since increased these thresholds to:

• Verified accounts – 10,000 posts
• Unverified accounts – 1,000 posts
• Recent unverified accounts – 500 posts

It’s actually increased these limits twice inside the five hours since Elon’s initial tweet, which does suggest that this may very well be fully resolved very shortly. But still, it’s an extreme measure to combat misuse – and there can also be no definitive method to stamp out tweet scraping entirely.

Twitter’s motion against data scrapers actually began two days ago, when Twitter began restricting non-logged-in users from viewing tweets.

Which, in itself, is a big move, because around 40% of tweet viewers actually achieve this without logging in, meaning that Twitter’s immediate addressable audience can be severely impacted by this modification.

The gamble that Twitter’s taking is that perhaps this prompts more people to log in, where it could actually show them more targeted ads. But the danger is that they don’t, and Twitter loses reach and relevance consequently.

Twitter CTO Elon Musk later explained that this was a short lived measure to handle misuse:

A key concern here is that many organizations at the moment are attempting to get into the generative AI game, and to be able to try this, they need conversational data, and Twitter’s ‘open garden’ approach, which is designed to facilitate broader discussion, makes it a chief goal for scraping to assemble such info.

Other platforms already took measures to handle this way back. Facebook, for instance, restricts the quantity of knowledge non-users can access, as does Instagram, and LinkedIn as well. These organizations recognized the worth of their proprietary data, but Twitter’s approach has all the time been to host broader, global discussion, which is why tweets have remained publicly accessible to a big degree.

But now, that appears to be an issue, which Twitter 2.0 is working to handle in a way that would severely impact usage.

Add to this the incontrovertible fact that Twitter has also significantly upped the worth of its API access, which was also designed to stop misuse of its data (note: Reddit has also increased the worth of its API usage), and it leads to a degree of no compromise for the platform – because while higher API access costs have priced many providers out, the vast majority of tweet data stays publicly available. That implies that lots of these developers will simply revert to the scraping route as a substitute, unless they will’t, which is the loophole that Twitter’s trying to close with this modification.

So what is going to the impact of that be?

Well, as noted, around 40% of Twitter users in Europe access tweets without logging in. That’s not necessarily reflective of all regions, but it surely does suggest that a significant slice of the platform’s 252 million every day energetic users are literally doing so without ever logging right into a profile.

Those users will now be much more limited in what they will view, while regular users may also potentially be restricted from using Twitter at a certain point, unless Twitter can give you a greater solution.

That may very well be to pinpoint accounts which are getting used by scrapers, to be able to stamp them out, and perhaps that’s a way to stop the practice. But the issue will likely remain, as scrapers will find other ways in, to be able to keep taking Twitter data.

As such, there’s no real solution to the issue, and it’ll likely take Twitter a while to handle the important thing entry points and overuse issues before it could actually comfortably lift all content limits.

That, eventually, could also find yourself seeing Twitter raising its partitions and restricting tweet access permanently, which could also impact its position as a key news breaking and discussion platform.

But at the identical time, Twitter’s caught in the center, with scrapers overloading its systems to fuel large language models. I do think this can be a legitimate concern, however the solutions, for Twitter, don’t look very appealing.