Twitter is now preventing unregistered individuals from accessing tweets and profiles on its platform unless they are logged into the social media network, a change that owner Elon Musk labels as “temporary.”
An individual not registered on the platform is prompted to sign in or create a Twitter account when attempting to view a tweet. As of Friday, users could still access tweets that showed up in Google searches or were incorporated into other websites.
Elon Musk explained in a tweet that this is a “temporary emergency measure” implemented to prevent excessive data scraping from the website. He stated, “We were experiencing such heavy data plundering that it was affecting the quality of service for regular users!”
Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Twitter has historically capitalized on the widespread availability of its tweets across the internet to boost engagement with the platform. This includes, for example, users sharing tweets with friends or associates who aren’t account holders.
Since assuming control of the San Francisco-based enterprise last year, Musk has introduced a series of alterations to the product lineup. In March, Twitter started imposing fees for access to its Application Programming Interface (API). The API was formerly utilized by renowned third-party applications such as the now obsolete Tweetbot and Twitterific, as well as by scholarly researchers. Presently, Twitter demands a monthly fee of $42,000 from customers for access to a mere 1% of tweets.
In April, Musk temporarily disabled the likes, replies, and retweets features for tweets containing links to Substack, the newsletter service platform. However, following backlash, Musk decided to rescind this modification.
