Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively.
According to the platform, users would have a temporary limit placed on the number of tweets they could view in a day.
In a later tweet, the CEO of Tesla added: “Rate limits increasing soon to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.”
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This comes after Twitter announced that it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
The social media platform had previously taken steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification checkmarks a part of the Twitter Blue program.
Earlier on Saturday, thousands of Twitter users had reported problems with the service, saying they were unable to retrieve tweets, their timelines had gone missing or followers had disappeared.
Nearly 6,000 people complained of issues, according to Down Detector, and many tweeted about their problems. The phrase “Twitterdown” was trending in the UK on the platform.
Some users reported getting the message “rate limit exceeded” when they tried to view tweets.
