Twitter to Limit How Many Tweets Users Can Read

Twitter logo - Reuters
Twitter logo - Reuters
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Twitter to Limit How Many Tweets Users Can Read

Twitter logo - Reuters
Twitter logo - Reuters

Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, Executive Chair Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.

Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300.

The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.

Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure."

Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience, Reuters reported.

Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Nearly 7,500 users across the social media platform reported issues with accessing the app during the peak of the outage at around 11:17 AM ET.

The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.



Microsoft Looks to Boost AI Performance in European Languages

FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
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Microsoft Looks to Boost AI Performance in European Languages

FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Microsoft signage is seen at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, US, January 18, 2023. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo

US tech behemoth Microsoft is investing millions of dollars to funnel more European-language data into AI development, company president Brad Smith told AFP Monday.

With today's leading AI models mostly trained on material in English, "the survival of these languages and the health of these cultures is quite literally at stake" without a course correction, Smith said in an interview.

AI models are "less capable when it is in a language that has insufficient data," he added -- which could push more users to switch to English even when it is not their native language.

Microsoft will from September set up research units in the eastern French city Strasbourg to "help expand the availability of multilingual data for AI development" in at least 10 of the European Union's 24 languages, including Estonian and Greek.

The work will include digitizing books and recording hundreds of hours of audio.

"This isn't about creating data for Microsoft to own. It is about creating data for the public to be able to use," Smith said, adding that the information would be shared on an open-source basis.

The US-based company has in recent months striven to position itself as especially compatible with a gathering political push for European technological sovereignty.

Leaders in the bloc have grown increasingly nervous at their dependency on US tech firms and infrastructure since Donald Trump's reelection to the White House.

In June, Microsoft said it was stepping up cooperation with European governments on cybersecurity and announced new "data sovereignty" measures for its data centers on the continent.

Smith said that Monday's announcement was just the latest evidence of the company's commitment to Europe.

Most leading AI firms are American or Chinese, although Europe has some standouts like France's Mistral or Franco-American platform Hugging Face.

Away from Microsoft, some European initiatives such as TildeLM are pushing to develop local-language AI models.

The Windows and Office developer also said Monday that it was working on a digital recreation of Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral that it plans to gift to the French state, as well as digitizing items from the country's BNF national library and Decorative Arts Museum.