Musk Blames AI Scraping For Tweet Paywalls

Big changes are coming to X, Inc., formerly Twitter Inc., and if early reports are any indication, users are split on whether it's a good thing.

Here's the short version: Moving forward, for the time being, you'll need an account to read tweets. Anyone who wants to view more than 600 posts per day must pay for Twitter Blue access.

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The Long(er) Version 

To say that's a big change is putting it mildly. It'll stop people who don't have an account — or aren't signed into their account — from viewing tweets. That's in addition to severely limiting the number of tweets users without Blue access can view.

According to a tweet by Twitter Executive Chair and Chief Technology Officer Elon Musk, the moves were necessary to "address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation."

The saving grace may be that Musk refers to the changes as "temporary limits." In his words, the changes are as follows:

• Verified accounts limited to reading 6,000 posts per day 
• Unverified accounts to 600 posts per day 
• New unverified accounts to 300 per day

A follow-up tweet by Musk noted that rate limits would soon increase to "8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified."

Is It Necessary?

There's no right or wrong answer to this question. It depends on what side of the aisle you sit on.

One day before Musk rolled out these limitations, people began to realize that Twitter was blocking access to anyone who wasn't logged into an account. Musk explained the change was necessary because "several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience."

This is another example of how artificial intelligence is impacting the way people create, share and consume content. Moving forward, it'll be interesting to see when Twitter decides to remove these limitations and if they do, whether there's a new system in place to prevent AI scraping and alleged misuse. 

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