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- Elon Musk has announced limits on the number of tweets Twitter users can see to combat data scraping.
- The former head of Twitter’s trust and safety division said the basis for the decision “hasn’t passed the sniff test.”
- Restrictions on Twitter were introduced during contract negotiations for Google Cloud storage.
Elon Musk on Saturday announced a temporary tweet rate limit to limit the number of posts unauthenticated Twitter users can see, citing “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” as the reason for the restrictions. But the site’s former head of reliability and security said: The argument is “Does not pass sniff test.”
“To address the extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation, we have applied the following temporary restrictions,” Musk announced on Twitter in the first of a series of tweets about the decision. Throughout the day, Musk continued to post about rate limits, increasing the number of posts users could view each time.
As of 10 a.m. Saturday, verified accounts for paying users will initially be limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day, existing unverified accounts will be limited to viewing 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts will be limited to It was limited to 300 posts per day.By 3 p.m., Musk said Tweettheir number increased to 10k, 1k and 0.5k respectively.
As Twitter users scroll through the site, new content will stop appearing once the new display limit is reached. Instead, you’ll see a notification that says, “Something went wrong. Please reload.” or “Sorry, you’re rate limited. Please try again later.” reported.
Sporadic changes contributed to a sense of unease about restrictions. These statements made Twitter users skeptical about the reasons behind rate limits if they were to be removed the same day they were implemented.
“The scraping suddenly caused such dramatic performance issues that Twitter failed to pass the sniff test where they had no choice but to put everything behind login,” Yoel Roth said of the Twitter failure on Bluesky Social. I am writing in a thread. The rival app, which is still in beta testing, banned the creation of new accounts on Saturday, citing a large number of users leaving Twitter.
Ross, who worked on Twitter’s User Trust and Site Integrity teams for more than seven years, added, “Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew it. We were fine.” rice field.
Mr. Ross and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to an insider’s request for comment. Twitter’s press team responded with an automated response.
“There is some justification for Twitter and Reddit’s resentment of AI companies siphoning social data for free to train commercially profitable models,” Ross added. “But we must never forget that it is our data, not *our* data. Solutions to parasitic AI must be user-centric, not profit-centric.”
Twitter’s Restrictions arose in the midst of a bidding war with Google over cloud storage services. platformer reported in June that Musk refused to pay for an existing $1 billion deal between Twitter and the search giant.
bloomberg Then, under the leadership of Linda Yaccarino, Twitter reportedly resumed paying for essential cloud storage space under its contract with Google. Still, negotiations about the future of the partnership are ongoing.
A Google representative did not immediately respond to an insider’s request for comment.
twitter user it was done right away Infer It claimed that the limited functionality was due to Twitter’s failure to pay for Google’s cloud services. Still, Insider was unable to confirm the specific cause of the Twitter restrictions.
Ross posted to BlueSky that Saturday’s incident “isn’t the first time they’ve messed with rate limiters and completely destroyed a site.”
“There’s a reason limiters are one of the most locked-down in-house tools,” he added. “Mudging rate limits is probably the easiest way to beat Twitter.”