Twitter is limiting the number of tweets that various accounts can read per day in an effort to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, according to a post by Executive Chair Elon Musk on the social media platform.
Verified Accounts Limited to 6,000 Posts per Day
Initially, verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, Musk said. Unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300.
Temporary Reading Limitation Increased
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users. Musk announced this change in a separate post but did not provide further details.
Twitter Requires Account to View Tweets
Previously, Twitter had announced that it would require users to have an account on the social media platform in order to view tweets. Musk called this move a “temporary emergency measure.”
Aggressive Data Scraping Impacts User Experience
Musk stated that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” which was impacting the user experience. He had previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Twitter Outage
On Saturday morning, Twitter was down for thousands of users, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Nearly 7,500 users across the social media platform reported issues with accessing the app during the peak of the outage at around 11:17 AM ET.
Winning Back Advertisers and Boosting Subscription Revenue
The social media platform has previously taken steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.