Twitter discreetly abandons its requirement that users log in to view tweets. Several days after Twitter ceased displaying tweets to logged-out users, this fundamental feature appears to have been reinstated. Several editors at Engadget can once again view individual tweets without logging into their accounts. However, profiles appear to be broken for those who are not logged in. For instance, I can view a user’s bio, but I cannot view their Twitter feed. Meanwhile, previews of tweets are once again accessible in iMessage for some users.
The inaccessibility of tweets to logged-out users was a “temporary emergency measure,” according to Twitter owner Elon Musk. “We were experiencing such extensive data theft that it was degrading service for regular users,” he wrote.
Read more: Meta’s Methodology for Data Harvesting in Germany Loses Appeal
The company provided a similar justification for temporarily limiting the number of tweets each user can read per day. On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it had banned a number of third-party applications in an effort to “detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform,” such as those who scrape data to train artificial intelligence models. Twitter added that a minor percentage of users were affected by the rate limits at the time.
The Twitter communications department is no longer reachable for comment. Nonetheless, public tweets are once again accessible to anyone just as Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, is about to be released. This service is anticipated to launch on Thursday in several markets, but not in the European Union.
