![Fire :fire: 🔥](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f525.png)
Now let’s connect the Erica dot to last week’s change in Twitter policy, a policy change immediately affecting many of our C&C readers who don’t have, and don’t want, Twitter accounts. On Saturday, Elon Musk publicly announced a controversial new Twitter policy: reading limits.
A few hours later, after a lot of user pushback, Elon increased the daily reading limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 for verified, unverified, and new accounts. These cutoff numbers are called “rate limits,” and in order for them to work, Twitter users must be logged in — hence the need for accounts.
But why?
In his announcement, Musk referred to “extreme levels” of “data scraping” and “system manipulation.” What’s he talking about?
Data scraping is when a computer or AI downloads massive numbers of tweets at a time. Without getting too technical, the AI “pretends” to be a user, sending the Twitter servers thousands and thousands of rapidly-fired requests for more and more data, and apart from the unreal velocity of the requests, otherwise appears to be a regular social media addict on speed.
The AI saves all those scraped tweets in a searchable database someplace.
Twitter had noticed that there were increasingly massive amounts of these kinds of automated requests for user data happening all the time. Not only does it affect user privacy, but it drives up Twitter’s costs, because Twitter needs to rent bigger and faster servers to handle all that growing automatic demand on top of the normal, real live user demand.
Data scraping is not especially new; in 2020 it was widely reported how elections consultant Cambridge Analytica scraped Facebook for what now seems like very primitive information about people’s political preferences:
Yesterday, a software developer wrote a thread explaining the data scraping problem in more detail:
That’s only the first few paragraphs of his explanation. If you’re interested in this issue, read the whole thing. Another clue appeared when a user mused on Saturday about how data scraping seems connected with the soaring increase of venture capital for Artificial Intelligence “large language models” (which is what ChatGPT is called), and Musk responded yesterday with a “bullseye” emoji:
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “that’s all fascinating Jeff but what does it have to do with Fake Erica and a Twitter revolution?” Hang in there, it all connects up.
A deep-dive into deep-state manipulation, DNC bots, mind control, and Twitter's annoying new policy requiring a user account to view tweets.
www.coffeeandcovid.com