Jul.1 (Reuters) – Twitter is limiting the number of tweets per day different accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, executive chairman Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 messages per day, Musk said, adding that unauthenticated accounts will be limited to 600 messages per day and new unauthenticated accounts limited to 300.
The temporary read limit was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unauthenticated, and 500 posts per day for new unauthenticated users, Musk said in a separate message without providing further details.
Earlier, Twitter had announced that users must have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move Musk called a “temporary emergency measure” on Friday.
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
Musk had previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Twitter was down for thousands of users Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Nearly 7,500 users on the social media platform reported problems accessing the app during the peak of the outage around 11:17 a.m. ET.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter in Musk’s hands and boost subscription revenue by making verification ticks part of the Twitter Blue program.
Reporting by Anirudh Saligrama in Bengaluru; edited by Diane Craft, David Gregorio and Daniel Wallis