Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move owner Elon Musk called a “temporary emergency measure” on Friday.
Users attempting to view content on the platform will be prompted to sign up for an account or log into an existing account to view their favorite tweets.
“We were looting the data so much that it was degrading the service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet.
It added that hundreds of organizations or more were extracting data from Twitter “extremely aggressively”, affecting the user experience.
Musk has previously expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, which uses Twitter data to train its large language models.
“We will absolutely be taking legal action against those who stole our data and we look forward to seeing them in court, which is (hopefully) 2-3 years from now,” he said.
In a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro in May asked the tech giant to audit its use of Twitter content, alleging that the Windows developer violated an agreement on the use of the data of the social media company.
The company has initiated a series of moves to bring back advertisers who left the platform under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making checkmarks part of the Twitter Blue program.
Earlier in the month, Twitter had announced plans to focus on video, creator and commerce partnerships to reinvigorate the social media company’s business beyond digital advertising.
Twitter has also started charging users to access its application programming interface (API), used by researchers and third-party applications.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
