Twitter lifts some tweet viewing restrictions after 'emergency' measures
Twitter said extreme actions were necessary to combat bots, spam
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Twitter has removed some tweet view restrictions after putting limitations in place last weekend.
People can now open Twitter links in a browser without an account. Tweet previews popped up in Slack, on WhatsApp and were visible on iMessage.
Twitter owner Elon Musk made waves last week when he took "temporary" emergency measures to prevent data scraping on the platform.
Elon Musk, billionaire and chief executive officer of Tesla, at the Viva Tech fair in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. (Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" the Tesla chief claimed.
The cause of the changes, according to Musk, was hundreds of organizations that were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively," impacting user experience.
"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation," he said, writing separately that there would be future legal action taken against "those who stole our data."
Musk named Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
BERLIN, GERMANY - MARCH 03: The logo of the Twitter app is seen on a smartphone on March 3, 2023, in Berlin, Germany. ((Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
"Sam Altman was trying to suck us dry," Musk alleged then.
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OpenAI did not immediately respond to FOX Business' requests for comment.
On Tuesday he agreed with a podcaster that some large artificial intelligence models would "definitely" need to write some large checks to Twitter, Reddit and Quora.
SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 16, 2023. ((Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
Musk also implemented read limits for users as a method to fight data scraping, but quickly raised the number of posts limited to specific users after a harsh reaction to the decision.
Twitter wrote in a blog post that the extreme measures were necessary to remove spam and bots.
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"That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection," it said.
"Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal."