Twitter Finally Drops One Of Its Most Annoying Features
For a brief spell starting on June 30, Twitter implemented a controversial change that made it mandatory to log in for viewing tweets or a Twitter profile. In a nutshell, the Elon Musk-owned company closed the entire social media platform for people that don't have a Twitter account. That policy appears to have been quietly repealed.
Now, if you open a tweet URL, you are no longer given a log-in prompt. The tweet URL opens just fine in the web browser of your choice, just the way things were before the rule was evidently put in place. However, there still appears to be some technical snag that keeps Twitter profiles only partially visible.
If you click on a Twitter profile URL or tap on the profile icon on a tweet without logging in — or if you are browsing the web incognito — you will only see the banner page, but none of the tweets posted or shared by that account. Instead of content, you see a blue "Retry" button that doesn't do anything, irrespective of how many times you select it.
"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk explained when the controversial requirement was first put in place. Back then, he classified it as a temporary, emergency measure, but didn't say how long it will take before Twitter switches back to normal.
Musk is trying to keep Twitter afloat
Musk further reasoned that some organizations were engaged in extremely aggressive data scraping and it was affecting the overall user experience. To recall, Musk isn't a fan of data scraping, especially by AI labs like OpenAI, and has warned in the not-too-distant past that he will take the corporate culprits to court over it.
Twitter isn't the only platform that is averse to offering its precious human interaction data to AI labs as free lunch. Reddit also effectively ended the era of free APIs to protect its user data from AI labs, leading to a widespread backlash that ended in the permanent shutdown of third-party apps like Apollo — while communities continue to protest in their own unique ways.
In an official blog post, the company explained that it implemented certain limits as it sought to stop "scraping people's public Twitter data to build AI models." To recall, Twitter has also limited the number of tweets you can view each day, arguing that it was necessary to stop bad actors from manipulating people and their conversations.
While the move was widely criticized as just another tactic by Musk to sell Twitter Blue subscriptions, the company's new CEO Linda Yaccarino justified it as a big move to strengthen the platform. The troubles are far from over for Twitter, as Meta is just a day away from a launching an Instagram spin-off app called "Threads" that aims to offer an escape away from Twitter.