Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Executive Chair Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform.
Musk said verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, adding that unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post.
Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk called a “temporary emergency measure.”
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Musk 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.
Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, 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.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of 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.
