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- Elon Musk has announced a limit on the number of tweets that Twitter users can view in order to prevent data scraping.
- The former Twitter head of trust, safety and security said that the reasoning behind the decision did not "pass the sniff test."
- Twitter's limited functionality comes as negotiations are underway for a Google Cloud Storage contract.
Elon Musk announced on Saturday temporary rate limits for tweet viewing, which will limit the number of posts that un-verified Twitter accounts can view. He blamed "extreme data scraping and system manipulation" as the reason behind the limitations. But the former head of the site's trust and safety department says this argument "doesn’t pass the smell test."
Musk, in his first tweet about the decision, announced that "to address extreme levels data scraping and system manipulation we've implemented the following temporary limitations." Musk posted about the rate limit throughout the day. Each time, the number of posts that users could see increased.
By 10 a.m. on Saturday, paid accounts were limited to 6,000 posts a day. Unverified accounts could only read 600 posts whereas new unverified users had 300 posts. Musk tweeted that by 3 p.m. these numbers had risen to 10k posts, 1k posts, and 0.5k.
Once Twitter users reached the new viewing limit, no more content was displayed. Instead, a notification was displayed that read "Something went terribly wrong." You can either reload or click "Sorry you have a rate limit". Insider reported that you should wait for a few seconds and then try again.
The frequent changes created a feeling of uncertainty around the restrictions. Twitter users were sceptical about the rationale behind the rate cap if it was removed on the same day as it was introduced.
It doesn't make sense that scraping suddenly caused such dramatic performance issues that Twitter was forced to implement a login. Yoel Roth said this in a post about the Twitter outage in Bluesky social. The rival app, still in beta test, had prohibited the creation of new accounts on Saturday due to the large number of Twitter users who were migrating to Bluesky.
Roth, who has worked in the User Trust and Site Integrity teams at Twitter for over seven years, said: "Scraping is the open secret behind Twitter data access. We were aware of it. "It was fine.
Roth and Musk did not immediately respond when Insider asked for comment. Twitter's press team responded with an automated reply.
Roth said: "There is some validity to Twitter and Reddit's anger at AI companies who snarf up social data for free in order to build commercially profitable models." But they shouldn't forget that this is not *their* information — it's ours. "A solution to parasitic artificial intelligence needs to be user-centric and not profit-centric."
Platformer reported that Musk refused to pay for Twitter's $1 billion contract.
Bloomberg reported that Twitter, under Linda Yaccarino, has resumed payments to Google on its contract for essential cloud storage. Negotiations about the future partnership continue.
Insider's comment to Google was not immediately responded to by a representative of Google.
Twitter users jumped to the conclusion that Twitter had not paid for Google's cloud services, which would explain why it was unable to provide certain features. Insider was unable to confirm a cause for Twitter's restrictions.
Roth wrote on Bluesky, "Saturday's incident isn't the first time that they've broken the site completely by bumbling about in the rate limiter."
He added, "There's a good reason why the limiter is one of the most restricted internal tools." "Failure to adhere to rate limits may be the quickest way to crash Twitter."
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By: ktangalakislippert@insider.com (Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert)
Title: Elon Musk blamed data scraping for strict ‘rate limits’ on viewing tweets. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety says it’s not the first time the site’s been broken by someone ‘bumbling around in the rate limiter.’
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/yoel-roth-twitter-rate-limit-bumbling-around-google-cloud-storage-2023-7
Published Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 02:08:03 +0000
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