The Story Behind Elon Musk’s Tweet Restriction Fiasco
While the finer factors of operating a social media enterprise could be debated, one fundamental reality is that all of them run on consideration. Tech leaders are incentivized to develop their person bases so there are extra folks taking a look at extra adverts for extra time. It’s simply good enterprise.
As the proprietor of Twitter, Elon Musk presumably shared that purpose. But he claimed he hadn’t purchased Twitter to earn money. This freed him as much as concentrate on different passions: stopping rival tech corporations from scraping Twitter’s information with out permission—even when it meant dropping eyeballs on adverts.
Data-scraping was a recognized drawback at Twitter. “Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine,” Yoel Roth wrote on the Twitter various Bluesky. AI corporations particularly have been notorious for gobbling up enormous swaths of textual content to coach giant language fashions. Now that these corporations have been price some huge cash, the scenario was removed from tremendous, in Musk’s opinion.
In November 2022, OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, a chatbot that might generate convincingly human textual content. By January 2023, the app had over 100 million customers, making it the quickest rising shopper app of all time. Three months later, OpenAI secured one other spherical of funding that closed at an astounding valuation of $29 billion, greater than Twitter was price, by Musk’s estimation.
OpenAI was a sore topic for Musk, who’d been one of many authentic founders and a serious donor earlier than stepping down in 2018 over disagreements with the opposite founders. After ChatGPT launched, Musk made no secret of the truth that he disagreed with the guardrails that OpenAI placed on the chatbot to cease it from relaying harmful or insensitive information. “The danger of training AI to be woke—in other words, lie—is deadly,” Musk stated on December 16, 2022. He was toying with beginning a competitor.
Near the tip of June 2023, Musk launched a two-part offensive to cease information scrapers, first directing Twitter workers to briefly block “logged out view.” The change would imply that solely folks with Twitter accounts may view tweets.
“Logged out view” had a sophisticated historical past at Twitter. It was rumored to have performed an element within the Arab Spring, permitting dissidents to view tweets with out having to create a Twitter account and threat compromising their anonymity. But it was additionally an easy accessibility level for individuals who wished to scrape Twitter information.
Once Twitter made the change, Google was briefly blocked from crawling Twitter and serving up related tweets in search outcomes—a transfer that might negatively influence Twitter’s site visitors. “We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” Google spokesperson Lara Levin informed The Verge. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.” As engineers mentioned doable workarounds on Slack, one wrote: “Surely this was expected when that decision was made?”
Then engineers detected an “explosion of logged in requests,” in response to inside Slack messages, indicating that information scrapers had merely logged in to Twitter to proceed scraping. Musk ordered the change to be reversed.
On July 1, 2023, Musk launched half two of the offensive. Suddenly, if a person scrolled for only a few minutes, an error message popped up. “Sorry, you are rate limited,” the message learn. “Please wait a few moments then try again.”
