Viewing Tweets has always been easy for anyone who didn’t actually have a Twitter account. Many Tweets show up in web searches and can be clicked and viewed on any browser. But things are going to change in what Elon Musk calls a “temporary emergency measure.”
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Update, Saturday, July 1, 2023: Elon Musk elaborated on this story some more in the Tweet below:
Going forward, users who want to view Twitter content will be asked to sign up for a Twitter account or log into an existing account to view any content at all. This isn’t unusual, many websites and social sites have done this for years. MeWe is a good example, you cannot view content on MeWe without having an account to do so.
Musk has his reasons for requiring users to have an account to view Tweets. “We were getting pillaged data so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet. Reuters says that he added that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting the user experience. “We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward to seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said.
Musk’s lawyers have sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in which Twitter claims Microsoft has violated an agreement between the two companies concerning Twitter’s data. This will be an interesting next few months finding out where all these leads. We have many Tweets embedded in a variety of articles across our site, we wonder if those will be gimp’ed.
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