Elon Musk imposes daily limits on reading posts on Twitter
San Francisco; Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has implemented limitations on the number of tweets that most users can view each day. He cited the purpose of these restrictions as an effort to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the popular social media platform.
As part of the recent changes, individuals are now required to log in to access tweets and profiles, deviating from the platform's longstanding practice of allowing unrestricted browsing. This shift comes after Musk's acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion last year, which he frequently referred to as the world's digital town square.
Consequently, users may find themselves locked out of Twitter for the remainder of the day after scrolling through many tweets. On Saturday, numerous users expressed their frustration at being unable to access the site.
In a tweet on Friday, Musk clarified that these new restrictions are temporary measures put in place due to excessive data pillaging, which was adversely impacting the service quality for regular users.
Elon Musk has expressed concern over using Twitter data to train popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, which generate human-like text, photos, videos, and other content by analyzing vast amounts of online information.
Regarding the restrictions, Musk provided further details on Saturday. He mentioned that unverified accounts would have a temporary limit of 600 posts per day, while verified accounts could scroll through up to 6,000 posts. However, following backlash, Musk raised the threshold to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts. Eventually, the limits were set at 1,000 posts for unverified accounts and 10,000 for verified accounts.
As a consequence of the crackdown, more than 7,500 people experienced issues with the social media service at one point on Saturday, according to complaints recorded on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. Although this represents a relatively small portion of Twitter's over 200 million worldwide users, the widespread problems led to the trending of the hashtag #TwitterDown in certain regions.
The higher limit allowed for verified accounts is part of Musk's $8-per-month subscription service, introduced earlier this year to boost Twitter's revenue. Since Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, took over the company and implemented cost-cutting measures, including significant layoffs, Twitter's revenue has declined sharply.
Advertisers have reduced their spending on Twitter due to the platform's changes that have allowed more controversial and divisive content, offending a broader segment of its user base. In an attempt to regain advertisers' trust, Musk recently hired Linda Yaccarino, a longtime NBC Universal executive, as Twitter's CEO.
When the Associated Press inquired about the access problems experienced on Saturday, Twitter responded with a generic automated reply typically sent to most media queries, failing to address the specific question.