Twitter announces big change to increase its users; Sign-in becomes compulsory

Twitter has made it mandatory to create an account on its platform first in order to view tweets. However, Elon Musk called the move a "temporary emergency measure".

Users who try to view content on Twitter will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an existing account to see their favorite tweets.

When an unregistered user tries to view a tweet, the site prompts them to log in or sign up for a Twitter account. As of Friday, users could still see tweets that appeared in Google searches or were embedded in other sites.

"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 organisations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", affecting user experience.

Earlier this week a disproportional amount of users were notified that they had been suspended for three days due to spam.

Musk,who is no longer CEO of Twitter, has expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OPenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

Musk said he will take legal action against those who stole "Twitter data and look forward to seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now".

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 checkmarks 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.