If you're dunking on Elon's rate limits, it's important to consider the points raised in this article
Discussion
Nah... this is all hogwash.
1. The data has already been scrapped and cannot be unscrapped.
2. Bot nets negate rate limits. It's well documented that Twitter bot nets have accounts that have been running since the early 2010s which Elon doesn't seem to bothered by. These botnets would happily become Big Data vendors selling tweets with a more liberal usage policy on that data.
3. Censorship is a policy enforced in the most rudimentary ways. Why would a censors enforce it's policies via AI when it could just be enforced via KYC?
Thought provoking comments. Let me respond:
1. The value in an "AI censorship death star" is not to censor past topics, but to censor upcoming topics in realtime. So while the data cannot be unscraped, this throws a spanner in the works for scraping going forward (which is what matters)
2. Using 2021 numbers there were around 500 million tweets per day, meaning you would need 500,000 bots in the botnet. Certainly possible to have a botnet of that size, however I suspect Twitter would be able to detect commonality in such a large botnet and disable it. But yes, possible, even though I rate it as unlikely.
3. You might be surprised with how sophisticated the state sponsored censorship apparatus is. #twitterfiles showed that AI was used by government agencies to censor Twitter under nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m , so we don't have to debate this - the empirical evidence shows us that AI gets used. It's way more effective than anything ever used in the past.
It’s an interesting article. I don’t know what to believe. Some techies said that it might have been a bug on the website that hammered their servers. This guy in the video is telling a different story. I guess we’ll see what happens.