What is Data Scraping That Elon Musk Wants To End On Twitter?

Tech billionaire Elon Musk announced recently that Twitter is implementing restrictions on the maximum number of posts a user can read daily in order to prevent data scraping and system manipulation. From now, the maximum daily reading limit is set at 6000 for verified accounts, 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts.

Data is often referred to as the modern-age crude oil because of its potential to make the possessor immensely wealthy. It holds significant value as it provides profound insights and can reveal a plethora of information. By analyzing data, one can decipher personal preferences, shopping habits, TV viewing patterns, sleeping habits, and much more.

This has resulted in a fierce battle among companies to acquire the largest possible amount of data through various channels.

What is Data/Web Scraping?

Data/web scraping is an automated process of gathering information from websites or web pages, which can then be utilized for various business purposes. Data scraping tools are capable of extracting data from millions or billions of users and organizing it in a structured manner, such as a spreadsheet.

This technique can be used for positive purposes, such as monitoring market prices on e-commerce sites or identifying the latest trends and breaking headlines for journalism.

Still Confused?

Let’s simplify it further with a metaphor.

Imagine you are a detective working on a big case. Your job is to gather information and clues from different sources to solve the mystery. Now, imagine there is a massive library with thousands of books, each containing a piece of information relevant to your case.

However, you don’t have the time to read all those books individually, and it would take forever to find what you need.

This is where data scraping comes into play. It’s like having a super-fast assistant who can read all the books for you and find the specific information you require. This assistant has the special ability to scan through the pages of each book and extract the important details.

In the digital world, websites are equivalent to the books in our library. They hold a vast amount of information, but manually searching through each webpage would be time-consuming.

Instead of reading each webpage manually, we use data scraping tools, which act as our super-fast assistant. These tools automatically browse through websites and extract the specific data we are interested in, similar to the detective’s assistant finding crucial clues.

Why does Musk Want to Stop it?

Data scraping can become unethical when it violates the terms and conditions set by the entity. If businesses engage in data scraping for the sole purpose of benefiting from a large amount of data, it becomes problematic. It can be seen as a violation of netizens’ privacy and copyright.

Twitter has a vast user base where individuals share their thoughts, images, ideas, perspectives, opinions, and more. If other businesses engage in data scraping, it becomes a blatant infringement of copyright.

Musk believes that limiting the number of posts users can view per day is the only way to stop data scraping and prevent big artificial intelligence companies, such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others, from scraping Twitter user data, which negatively impacts the user experience on the platform.

Thanks For Reading!

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