Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced a temporary limitation on the number of tweets that users can view in order to combat “excessive data scraping and system manipulation.” The company recently elaborated on this measure.
Twitter stated that the usage limitations were imposed temporarily to identify and eradicate bots and other malicious entities that may harm the platform. The company further clarified that notifying users about these measures in advance would have allowed these malicious actors to modify their behavior and avoid detection.
“To uphold the authenticity of our user base, we need to take stringent measures to purge our platform of spam and bots,” the company affirmed.
At a broader level, the company aims to prevent these accounts from 1) extracting public Twitter data to develop AI models and 2) manipulating conversations and individuals on the platform in a variety of ways.
Musk has always been vocally critical of bot accounts on Twitter. He even declared that one of his primary focuses would be to eradicate the scam bots, spam bots, and bot armies that degrade the platform’s user experience.
Last year, Musk criticized Twitter for obscuring the true quantity of bot accounts and then attempted to retract his company’s acquisition bid.
Only a Minor Impact
Twitter asserts that the limitations only impact a small fraction of its user base.
“We will provide an update once our work is completed. The implications on advertising have been insignificant,” the company stated.
One report suggested that Twitter’s modifications impacted the visibility of tweets and pages in Google Search. The company admitted that its ability to showcase Twitter results has been curtailed.
“We acknowledge that our capability to crawl Twitter.com has been restricted, which affects our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” spokesperson Lara Levin acknowledged.
“Websites retain the authority to decide whether crawlers can access their content,” Levin added.
