Twitter will now Require you to have an Account and Sign In to View Tweets

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Twitter, the popular social media platform, has recently initiated a significant policy change that requires users to be signed in to view tweets. This abrupt modification has been rolled out without an official announcement from the company. Instead, users started to notice the change when they were redirected to a sign-in page upon attempting to view tweets or profiles without being logged in.

Elon Musk, who is no longer the CEO of Twitter but remains deeply involved in its operations, has referred to this move as a “temporary emergency measure”. Musk has previously expressed his disapproval of AI companies using Twitter’s data to train their models. In particular, he has criticized OpenAI, which has launched a plugin for its popular ChatGPT AI chatbot that allows users to scrape information from any website, including Twitter.

Some speculate that Twitter’s new policy could be an attempt to grow its user base by forcing “silent lurkers” to create an account. Back in 2015, Twitter reported that 500 million people visited the platform each month without logging in. This number is higher than Twitter’s count for monthly active users, indicating a vast pool of potential users who aren’t providing their data for Twitter to monetize. By requiring these visitors to sign up, Twitter might be aiming to increase its user base and appeal to potential advertisers.

However, there are potential drawbacks to this decision. Search engine algorithms could rank Twitter’s content lower if tweets aren’t publicly accessible, which would direct fewer people to the site from search engines like Google. This could result in a significant loss of traffic for Twitter.

With the new CEO Linda Yaccarino settling into her role and the platform still riddled with technical errors, this policy change adds another layer to the challenges Twitter is currently facing. While it is unclear how long this policy will be in place or what its long-term implications will be, it represents a notable shift in Twitter’s approach to user access and data privacy.

Please note that there is no official statement from Twitter explaining this change in detail as of the time this article was written. More information will be provided as updates become available.

I hope you find this article informative. For more tech news and updates, stay tuned!