It is no longer necessary to be logged in to Twitter to read tweets. Twitter had shielded the messages from the outside world last week, but that measure seems to have been quietly reversed, at least in part.
When people get a link to a tweet, they can now see it even if they’re not logged in. It also succeeds again in going to specific tweets via the search results on Google. But people who want to visit a user’s profile still encounter a login screen.
Twitter and its owner Elon Musk have not commented on the latest change. Questions to spokespersons are automatically answered with a “smiling poop” emoji, something the eccentric millionaire started doing in March, reportedly out of distaste for the press.
According to Musk, the fact that only logged-in users could see tweets in recent days was an emergency measure. “So much data was looted that services for normal users were compromised,” he wrote last week.
Other companies would collect the texts in tweets (so-called “scraping”) to train and improve their artificial intelligence systems. At the time, Musk did not disclose how long the measure would last.
