Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased 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, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.
Previously, Twitter had announced that it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
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.
The social media platform had previously taken steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.
Earlier on Saturday, thousands of Twitter users had reported problems with the service, saying they were unable to retrieve tweets, their timelines had gone missing or that followers had disappeared.
Nearly 6,000 people complained of issues, according to Down Detector, and many tweeted about their problems. The phrase “Twitterdown” was trending in the UK on the platform.
Some users reported getting the message “rate limit exceeded” when they tried to view tweets.
