NEW YORK – Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Elon Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.

Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log in to an existing account to see their favourite tweets.

“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Mr Musk said in a tweet.

He added that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.

Mr Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said.

In a letter addressed to Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella, Mr 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 Mr Musk’s ownership and to increase subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

In June, Twitter had announced plans to focus on video, creator and commerce partnerships to revitalise 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. REUTERS