Twitter says users must be verified to access TweetDeck

Twitter made the announcement in a tweet detailing an improved version of TweetDeck with new features. It was unclear if Twitter will charge users for both the new and old versions of TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is widely used by businesses and news organizations to easily monitor content. And charging for TweetDeck could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertising revenue under billionaire Elon Musk’s ownership.

The announcement has come just days after Elon Musk temporarily imposed restrictions on the number of tweets users could read per day. Going by the announcement, a verified Twitter user can read up to 10,000 tweets in 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.

The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said.

Musk said that much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models and was causing traffic issues on the site.

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

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.

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.

Updated: 04 Jul 2023, 08:12 AM IST