Twitter purposely imposed its new restrictions by surprise, here’s why

Twitter imposed restrictions for reading quite abruptly last week, and it was a strategy.

Last week, Elon Musk announced the implementation of rather harsh restrictions on the number of messages a user could read. And if we have since had information on the reasons for this decision, its timing is now explained in a note from the social network’s business blog.

A surprise attack

The veil is beginning to lift on Twitter’s latest adventures. As Elon Musk spoke on 1^er July of ” extreme levels of data collection and system manipulation users started scratching their heads. Who could he be talking about? If, since then, the name of ChatGPT has become a plausible culprit, we learn today why these limits fell without prior announcements.

The objective was simply to take the hostile actors by surprise. “ We have temporarily restricted usage so that we can detect and eliminate bots and other malicious actors that harm the platform. Any advance notice of these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior in order to evade detection. », Explains the American company.

AI and manipulation in the sights of Twitter

But the bluebird didn’t settle for vague accusations and gave two sources of trouble to contend with. The first would come from users recovering data from the network to build artificial intelligence models (hello ChatGPT, and others surely). The second would relate to the accounts “ manipulating people and conversations on the platform “. Twitter would be cleaning up today.

The operation is no less expensive for the social network, which nevertheless states in the same note that the impact on users and advertisers would have been minimal. Finally, Twitter is committed to communicating with the public when closing transactions. This Wednesday, July 5, it seems that navigation on the platform is more fluid than a week ago.

Sources: Twitter Blog, Engadget