Twitter declares 'temporary limits' on readable tweets per day
What's the story
Twitter is limiting the number of tweets that accounts can read per day in order to prevent "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation," said Executive Chair Elon Musk. He claimed that hundreds of organizations were "extremely aggressively" scraping Twitter data, which was negatively affecting user experience. The announcement comes following an outage that rendered the platform unusable for thousands of users worldwide.
Context
Why does this story matter?
A lot has happened on Twitter since Musk took charge. The series of events doesn't seem to stop even after he stepped down as the CEO. There are now "temporary limits" on how many tweets a user can read per day, and these restrictions differ for verified, unverified, and recently joined accounts. Those with blue badges get access to more tweets than non-verified ones.
Scenario
Verified accounts can read 10,000 tweets per day
On Saturday, Musk announced a temporary reading restriction, with verified accounts being limited to reading 6,000 posts/day and unverified and newly joined users to 600 and 300 posts, respectively. Later, via a separate tweet, Musk stated that the limits were increased to 10,000 posts/day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified ones, and 500 posts daily for new unverified users.
Twitter Post
Changes came into effect right after Musk's announcement
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
More
What might be reason behind this move?
Musk and Co. have already implemented various strategies to encourage people to sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription. When compared to non-verified users, the paid subscription grants many advantages, such as greater reach, the ability to post longer tweets, and higher-quality videos, among other things. The reading restriction appears to be another attempt to get users to enroll in the Blue badge program.
Information
To view tweets, you must first sign in
Twitter recently announced that it would need users to have an account or sign in on the social media platform in order to view tweets. The announcement was made by Musk this Friday, referring to it as a "temporary emergency measure."
Previously
Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday
On Saturday, thousands of users across the globe were unable to access Twitter, according to the outage monitoring website Downdetector. When the problem was at its worst, nearly 7,500 users complained that they were having trouble accessing the app. The outage now appears to be a result of the new change that was implemented later in the day.