Twitter announced yet another change for users: in order to use TweetDeck, users will now need to be verified. The Reuters news agency reports that the modification will go into effect in 30 days.
Twitter users verified to access TweetDeck: In a tweet describing an updated TweetDeck with additional capabilities, Twitter made the announcement. If Twitter would charge users for both the new and previous versions of TweetDeck is still unknown.
Businesses and news organisations frequently use TweetDeck to conveniently monitor information. Additionally, charging for TweetDeck would increase Twitter’s revenue, which has been struggling to keep its advertising revenue under the control of billionaire Elon Musk.
Elon Musk briefly limited the number of tweets users may view each day just days before the announcement. The announcement states that Twitter allows verified users to view up to 10,000 tweets each day, while non-verified users, or free accounts, which constitute the majority of users, have a limit of 1,000 tweets per day for reading.
The number of tweets from new, unverified accounts is capped at 500.
“Twitter Implements Measures Against Data Scraping and System Manipulation, Elon Musk Reveals”
Musk stated that they made the choice “to address the extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by outside platforms.
Musk stated that businesses were actively engaging in data scraping to create AI models, which resulted in traffic issues on the website.
According to Musk, “a few hundred organisations (possibly more) were aggressively scraping Twitter data, to the point where it was affecting the actual user experience.”
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he claimed.
Twitter is not the only large social media company that is struggling to keep up with the rapidly expanding AI market.
Midway through June, Reddit increased the costs for outside developers who were accessing its data and deleting forum posts.