Twitter removes sign in requirement to access tweets on the platform

Within a week after mandating sign-in for users to view posts on Twitter, the social media platform has finally removed this restriction. While announcing the login requirement, Elon Musk said that these are temporary measures to prevent data scraping by AI startups.  Also Read: Elon Musk’s X Rolls Out New ‘Chat’ Feature With End-to-End Encryption And Disappearing Messages

“Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” he said in a tweet. Also Read: Elon Musk Reveals Big Gaming Plans: xAI To Launch ‘AI-Generated Game’ By 2026

Twitter is yet to make any official announcement about allowing browsing access to users without signing in to their accounts. However, Tech Crunch in one of its reports has confirmed that users can now access tweets on the platform without signing in to their accounts.   Also Read: Why Thousands Are Cancelling Netflix After Elon Musk’s Latest Tweet

This move comes a day before Meta launched its Threads platforms, which is touted to rival Twitter. Interestingly, people can browse Threads without signing in, a feature which is not available on Instagram. 

This move will help Twitter to retain a better ranking in search engine algorithms and advertisers will also get a good number of views on their ads. 

Twitter has also put a ‘view limit’ on the number of posts users can view in a day to fight data scraping. Under the new view limits, unverified users can see 1,000 posts per day and verified users can see 10,000 posts per day. 

Further complicating things for social media platforms, Google has recently updated its privacy policy on the use of publicly available data to train its AI models. Google has updated its publicly accessible sources section on its privacy and terms page. It now says that the company will use publicly available online data to build products such as Bard and Cloud AI capabilities. Furthermore, the company has replaced the term ‘language models’ with AI models.

The use of publicly available data on social media platforms by these tech giants affects the normal functioning of platforms for general users. As a result of this, some social media platforms are also making changes in the ways their users access these platforms. 

Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after launching Threads, returned to Twitter after more than 11 years. Zuckerberg posted a meme of a man accusing another man of being an impostor. Both of them are dressed as Spider-Man. The picture, posted without any comment, comes from a 1967 Spider-Man comic called “Double Identity”, where a bad guy pretends to be the good guy. Zuckerberg’s last post on Twitter was on January 18, 2012.

Meta CEO describes Threads as an “open and friendly public space for conversation.”