Early Friday afternoon, netizens noticed that Twitter no longer allowed people to view tweets if they weren’t logged into the service. At this point, it was difficult to tell whether the change was due to a technical error or a conscious decision by management. Later in the day, however, Elon Musk addressed the issue.
Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) have parsed Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point that it has compromised the actual user experience.
What should we do to stop this? I’m open to ideas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
“Temporary emergency measure,” he said claimed in a tweet. “We’ve had data looted so many times that it’s impacted service to regular users!” Musk then shared more context. “Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) have been extremely aggressive in mining Twitter data, to the point that it has compromised the actual user experience.” he said, in response to a tweet from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lamenting the “increasingly broken” state of the internet. In a separate tweet spotted by Mashable, Twitter engineer Aqueel Miqdad called The company would allow opted-out access back “in the near future.”
Of course, without more information, it’s hard to say if Twitter users will experience reduced service due to the data scrapers Musk says are targeting the platform so aggressively. There isn’t a team at Twitter that hasn’t been affected by Musk’s cost cuts. In fact, the group responsible for maintaining the stability of Twitter’s servers has seen a fair number of layoffs and high-profile departures. In June, the company also hadn’t paid for its Google Cloud contract for several months.