San Francisco: Twitter has clarified its sudden move to “temporarily” impose rate cap on the micro-blogging platform.
“To ensure the authenticity of our user base, we have to take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform,” the company said on its business blog. “That’s why we’ve temporarily limited access so we can detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are causing harm to the platform.”
It also mentions that if the evil doers had known about these actions in advance, they would have changed their behavior to avoid being detected. At a high level, the company is working to stop these accounts — scraping people’s public Twitter data to create artificial intelligence (AI) models and manipulate people and conversations on the platform in various ways.
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“Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update as work is completed,” the company said.
The platform also claimed that the limits had “minimal” impact on advertising. It added, “While this work will never be completed, we are all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone.”
Commenting on the clarification, Twitter CEO Linda Yacarino said Tuesday, “When you have a mission like Twitter’s — you need to take big steps to strengthen the platform. This work is meaningful and ongoing.”
Last week, Twitter owner Elon Musk said he had implemented temporary limits on who could read how many posts in a day to prevent data scraping and system manipulation.
His clarification came as he was criticized by millions of users across the world including India as the micro-blogging platform suffered a major outage globally, leaving thousands of users unable to access the platform.