Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked
to sign up for an account or log into an existing account to see their
favourite tweets.
"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was
degrading service for normal users!" Musk said in a tweet.
He added that hundreds of organizations or more were
scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", affecting user
experience.
Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial
intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter's data to
train their large language models.
"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.
In a letter addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Musk's
lawyer Alex Spiro in May asked the tech giant to conduct an audit of its use of
Twitter's content, alleging the Windows developer violated an agreement over
using the social media company's data.
The company has initiated a range of measures to bring back
advertisers who left the platform under Musk's ownership and to increase
subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter
Blue program.
Earlier in the month, Twitter had announced plans to focus
on video, creator and commerce partnerships to revitalize the social media
company's business beyond digital advertising.
Twitter has also begun charging users to access its
application programming interface (API), used by third-party apps and
researchers. © Reuters