Twitter has also announced that users will have to sign in to their accounts on the platform to view Tweets.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter last year, announced that the microblogging site is putting a temporary cap on the number of Tweets users can read on the platform. The move was a measure to address data scrapping and system manipulation issues, Musk said in a Tweet on July 1.
According to another revised Tweet by Musk on Sunday, Twitter users who have verified accounts can read up to 10,000 posts per day, while unverified account users can read 1,000 posts a day. New users with unverified accounts will be allowed to read 500 posts in a day. Before the revision, and on Saturday, Musk said that verified Twitter users will be allowed to read up to 6000 posts per day, while the cap for unverified account users and new users with unverified accounts was 600 posts and 300 posts a day respectively.
The ex-Twitter chief executive officer, however, did not provide any details on why the revision was made. Also, he did not elaborate on who was scrapping Twitter’s data and for how long. However, according to a TechCrunch report, citing a blog by technologist Andy Baio, a bug is causing Twitter DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) itself and could be a possible reason that Musk took the latest measures.
Following Musk’s latest announcement for Twitter, the social media platform was reported down for thousands of users on Saturday morning. Some users complained that when they tried to view or post tweets they saw the “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message, while some other users reported seeing a “Rate limit exceeded error message.”
Prior to putting a cap on the number of tweets users can see, Twitter announced that users will have to have an account on the platform to view Tweets. The move will “make it harder for scrapers to take Twitter’s data like ChatGPT’s web browsing plugin has been doing.” Calling this a “temporary emergency measure, Musk said, “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
According to a Reuters report, Musk’s latest move could undermine efforts by the company’s new chief Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers. Yaccarino’s series of measures to bring back the advertisers who abandoned the platform will include introducing a video ads service to pursue more celebrities and raise headcount. She is also planning to introduce full-screen, sound-on video ads that would be visible to users while scrolling through the microblogging platform’s new short-video feed.
