SAN FRANCISCO, USA — Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited the number of tweets users can see each day, restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized exploration of potentially valuable data from the social media platform. The site now requires people to log in to view tweets and profiles, a change from its longstanding practice of allowing everyone to peruse chat in what Musk has often touted as the world’s digital marketplace since buying it for $44 billion. dollars last year. The restrictions could result in users being unable to access Twitter for the rest of the day after reviewing several hundred tweets. Thousands of users complained on Saturday about not being able to access the site. In a tweet on Friday, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “data was being looted so much that it was degrading service for normal users.” Musk has rejected what he calls a misuse of Twitter data to power popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, which sift through vast amounts of information online to generate text, photos, videos and other human-like content. Musk said Saturday that unverified accounts will be temporarily restricted to reading 600 posts a day, while verified accounts will be allowed up to 6,000. After facing backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds would be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts before settling at 1,000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively. The backlash began to have ripple effects, prompting more than 7,500 people to report problems using the service at one point on Saturday, according to complaints on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. Although this is a relatively small number of the more than 200 million Twitter users worldwide, the problem was widespread enough that the hashtag #TwitterDown became a trend in some parts of the world. The higher threshold allowed in verified accounts is part of an $8-a-month subscription service set up by Musk earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue. However, it has fallen sharply since Tesla’s billionaire CEO took over the company and laid off roughly three-quarters of the workforce to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy. Since then, advertisers have reduced their spending on Twitter, in part due to changes that have allowed more sometimes hateful and offensive content for a large part of the service’s audience. Musk recently hired NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino as CEO of Twitter to try to win back advertisers. An AP inquiry about the access issues on Saturday triggered a crude automated response that Twitter sends to most media inquiries without addressing the question.
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