Twitter has now required users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, as mandated by its owner Elon Musk in a bid to curb “pillaged” data.
In a tweet on Friday, Musk called the move as a “temporary emergency measure”.
“Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” he wrote.
Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an existing account to see their favorite tweets.
Musk noted that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
Previously, Musk expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he stated.
