- Twitter announced a cap on the number of posts users can view daily on a Twitter account.
- While unverified users could initially view 600 posts, those with Twitter blue accounts could view up to 6,000. This was later revised to increase the limit to 1,000 and 10,000, respectively.
Elon Musk has announced a change in Twitter’s policies to aggressively limit how many tweets a user can view daily. According to Musk’s tweet, the company would stop access to unverified accounts after hitting the limit of 600 tweets per day, while verified accounts could view up to 6,000 per day. Furthermore, new accounts would only be able to access 300 tweets per day.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023Opens a new window
A few hours after the update, he tweeted again, increasing the number of tweets viewed to 1,000 for unverified accounts and 10,000 for Twitter Blue accounts. The company has confirmed that the limits will be in place temporarily but has not said how long the blocks will be in place. Musk has also not confirmed if viewing ads will be part of the user limit.
Over 70,000 users reported issues accessing the site from Saturday, with notifications stating that they had exceeded their ‘rate limit’.
See More: Twitter Stress-Tested for Digital Services Act, Meta Next
Musk Speaks Against ‘Data Scraping’; Says It Hurts Experience of Real Users
According to Musk’s tweet, the limits were set to hit an increasingly extreme problem of system manipulation and data scraping, allegedly hurting users’ experience on the platform. He particularly slammed companies working on AI products, claiming that such businesses were scraping Twitter to train data models.
The limits have been criticized, with some claiming that the move will force users to move to Twitter Blue. Further, limiting viewing to 1,000 tweets will allow the user access to the platform for only a few minutes. Twitter has been struggling to keep its revenue up despite charging high fees to organizations using Twitter’s API. Even the introduction of Twitter Blue has been unable to completely help recover the lost advertising revenue since the company’s takeover by Musk in 2022.
This is the latest of many changes made by Twitter since the Musk takeover, including the merger with X.Corp, allowing users to create subscriber-only content and the introduction of Twitter Blue.
Do you think measures like tweet limits help control data scraping and system manipulation? Let us know your thoughts on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!
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