How Elon Musk bowls Twitter out of the Google Index

Elon Musk recently introduced a reading limit for tweets on Twitter. In doing so, he not only makes life difficult for the users of the short message service, but also for himself. Because the decision apparently also means that Google no longer indexes a lot of content.

“Something went wrong. Try loading it again”: This sentence is currently being read by more and more Google users who want to access Twitter content via the search engine. Because since the end of June 2023, only people with an active account can access published tweets.

Twitter owner Elon Musk announced only a short time later that the use would also be restricted for active users. Accordingly, there is now a reading limit for tweets. In addition, users can only view content after a successful login.

Reading limit for tweets: This is how Elon Musk restricts Twitter

After Musk made several adjustments to his original post and limits, verified Twitter Blue users are now only allowed to access a maximum of 10,000 posts per day. Non-verified accounts, on the other hand, only have access to 1,000 posts per day.

Users with a new account are allowed to read a maximum of 500 posts per day. According to Musk, the new read limit will be introduced to counteract the extreme extent of data scraping and system manipulation.

What is data scraping?

Data scraping is one Technology, in which a computer program extracts data from the output of another program. With the appropriate scraping tools, hackers can access data much faster than intended and use it for unauthorized purposes.

With the new read limit, Musk apparently wants to prevent large language models in particular from being unable to simply draw from the huge amounts of data that were previously freely accessible. For example, they form the basis for AI services such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. There are also allegations that Musk is eyeing new Twitter Blue subscriptions to generate more revenue.

Reading limit on Twitter: Elon Musk knocks Twitter out of the Google index

However, with the new restrictions, Elon Musk is also knocking Twitter out of the Google index. Because, as search engine expert Johannes Beus wrote in a LinkedInpost writes that Google is also one of the data scrapers that Musk is fighting.

If you look at the search engine to see what content has been indexed in the last few hours, it looks strange, writes Beus. “If you dig a little deeper into the analysis, the problem becomes obvious – Twitter also redirects the Googlebot to the login process.”

The consequences can already be clearly seen in the individual accounts: there is no longer any data that Google can index. At the moment, this mainly affects new content and high-profile accounts. However, Beus predicts that all tweets and content from Twitter will be affected if Twitter does not change its policy.

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