It might disrupt corrupt governments like those in the US and Europe spying on their peoples though. However, I'm pretty sure Twitter has a backdoor for them, because otherwise they'd shut it down.
I find the idea of there being a backdoor quite likely. That would mean PJW is off-base by virtue of the government still having direct access.
I also suspect Elon might be trying to drive the AI farms to negotiate payments for scraping rights than anything else. Twitter's data would be extremely valuable fodder for training Large Language Models, and Elon probably wants a cut. Cutting Google services out of the loop would be part of this, since if they're providing cloud services, they are in a position to demand payment from Twitter for hosting the very data set they're sampling.
No matter how you cut it, user convenience will be a casualty. Not that it matters: the users are the product-- not the customers.
If Elon goes all the way with paywalling the site, the users will be both the product and the customers. Reddit and YouTube seem intent on following the same model.
someone in my year at university (not an american university) was doing something on twitter and AI and needed to scrape a bunch of information from twitter directly though its public APIs
a few days before he said he would have been finished and ready to let his system do its thing elon/twitter banned exactly what he wanted to do (and i think the API was changed to prevent it as well)
so driving the AI farms to pay him or something kind of tracks
I find the idea of there being a backdoor quite likely. That would mean PJW is off-base by virtue of the government still having direct access.
I also suspect Elon might be trying to drive the AI farms to negotiate payments for scraping rights than anything else. Twitter's data would be extremely valuable fodder for training Large Language Models, and Elon probably wants a cut. Cutting Google services out of the loop would be part of this, since if they're providing cloud services, they are in a position to demand payment from Twitter for hosting the very data set they're sampling.
No matter how you cut it, user convenience will be a casualty. Not that it matters: the users are the product-- not the customers.
If Elon goes all the way with paywalling the site, the users will be both the product and the customers. Reddit and YouTube seem intent on following the same model.
Elon is trying to convert Twitter users into X jack of all trades monopoly on everything company and to do that he needs to know who the users are.
He's converting anonymous Twitter readers into ones that have an account and can be offered other X stuff.
someone in my year at university (not an american university) was doing something on twitter and AI and needed to scrape a bunch of information from twitter directly though its public APIs
a few days before he said he would have been finished and ready to let his system do its thing elon/twitter banned exactly what he wanted to do (and i think the API was changed to prevent it as well)
so driving the AI farms to pay him or something kind of tracks
It's also possible that backdoor changed. It could be a slow comply thing now.