The #RIPTwitter hashtag has been trending after Elon Musk announced that Twitter has applied a limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day.

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 10 000 tweets a day. Non-verified users, the free accounts that make up the majority of users, are limited to reading 1 000 tweets per day. New unverified accounts would be limited to 500 tweets.

 “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” said Musk in a tweet.

The measures are said to be temporary but Musk hasn’t given a timeline for how long they will be in place. Prior to this, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.

Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site.

To create AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed the programs examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.

“Several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.

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Reactions on Twitter

Popular football content creator Fabrizio Romano, whose content is in high demand around this time because he breaks stories of player transfers, has hit out at the new regulations by Twitter.

The millions that follow Romano quipped that he should buy Twitter, using Romano’s trademark ‘Here we go’ which Romano uses when a player’s transfer has been confirmed.

Twitter users are now looking for alternative social media platforms, but some don’t see Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook as a viable option as it comes with its own restrictions. There were even calls for South Africa’s very own Mxit to make a comeback. But South African podcaster Penuel has defended Musk’s decision.

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey was rather subdued in his reaction to the new limits on the platform.

“Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense,” Dorsey tweeted.

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“It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar… which I’m guilty of… but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.”

Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.

It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms, and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.

Here’s how some Twitter users reacted to the limits:

Additional reporting by AFP

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