Al Jazeera – Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, increased the temporary reading limitation 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.
He initially said that verified Twitter users are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day; unverified accounts up to 600 posts; and new unverified accounts up to 300.
Verified users will be limited to reading 10,000 tweets per day while unverified accounts can only access 1,000 posts. Elon Musk described the restrictions as a measure to limit ‘extreme levels’ of data scraping.
Twitter is limiting how many tweets various accounts can read per day, owner Elon Musk has said, in a bid to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
The restrictions, announced on Friday, began to have ripple effects early on Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn last year, initially said verified accounts will be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day.
New unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts a day, he said.
Musk later increased the temporary reading limitation 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.
He did not provide additional details.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
In a tweet on Friday, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
He 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.
