Elon Musk announces Twitter users will face a daily limit on the number of posts they can access
Musk stated that the introduction of post limitations is aimed at tackling the issue of excessive data scraping and system manipulation.
Elon Musk has revealed the implementation of “temporary restrictions” on the daily number of posts that Twitter users can access.
In a tweet on July 1st, Elon Musk stated that verified accounts will have a cap of 6000 posts per day, unverified accounts will be allowed to read up to 600 posts, and newly created unverified accounts will have a limit of 300 posts that they can read.
In a subsequent update, he revised the limits once more. Verified users would now have an increased limit of 8000 posts, unverified users would be allowed to read up to 800 posts, and new unverified users would have a limit of 400 posts. However, three hours later, he made further amendments, stating the new limits as “now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k.”
Since April, the display of the blue checkmark has been limited to Twitter Blue subscribers, a program initiated by Musk in October. Twitter Blue offers various features, such as the ability to edit tweets, in addition to the blue checkmark, for a subscription fee of $8.
According to Musk, the introduction of post limitations aims to tackle the issue of excessive data scraping and manipulation within the system.
On July 1st, users quickly noticed the alteration, resulting in over 7,000 reports of a Twitter outage around 11 a.m., as indicated by Downdetector data. However, at the time of this news report, the frequency of reports per hour had decreased to the 600s.
NBC News reported that users attempting to access the site encountered error messages such as “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.”
Starting from July 1st and extending into Sunday, hashtags related to the technical issue, such as #TwitterIsBroken, started gaining popularity and became trending topics.
