According to Variety: Twitter owner Elon Musk made a sudden announcement Saturday morning: The social media service has imposed a “temporary limit” on the amount of posts users can read. Verified accounts that have paid for a Twitter Blue membership can view 8000 posts per day, while most Twitter users with unverified accounts can only view 800 posts per day.
Newly registered unverified accounts get less than 400 per day, though Musk didn’t specify how old an account has to be to qualify for that level.
When the update was first announced, the number of post views for the same category of users was limited to 6000, 600 and 300 respectively. Elon Musk says Twitter is blocking access to users who are not logged in as an ’emergency measure’.
Elon Musk explains that Rails is built to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”. The announcement comes a day after Twitter took action on Friday to block access to the website for anyone not signed in as a registered user.
temporary emergency measure. Our data was being looted to such an extent that it was a disservice to normal users. Musk wrote on Friday afternoon. He also claimed that “several hundred organizations” were scraping Twitter data more aggressively, affecting the user experience.
What should we do to stop this? Musk said, I’m open to ideas. This new daily limit on readable posts appears to be one of those ideas. It is unclear how long these “temporary” limits will remain in place.
These recent announcements are the latest tumultuous events in the multi-billionaire’s venture with the social media site, after announcing his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022 before officially acquiring it in October 2022.
In early June, Elon Musk hired Linda Yacarino, a former top advertising sales executive at NBCU, as Twitter’s new CEO. Through her new role, Yacarino oversees business operations with the goal of increasing advertising revenue. In addition to the leadership change, nearly 80% of Twitter’s employees have been laid off since Musk took over the site.
He has since shared that he will attempt to re-hire some of those employees after the platform encountered technical problems, including the poor execution of the Twitter Spaces Live audio program with Ron DeSantis, who used the occasion to announce his 2024 presidential campaign.