By Abimbola Ogunnaike
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO,Elon Musk, has disclosed the reason twitter users will have a temporary limit placed on the number of tweets they can read in a day.
Musk said the measure was taken to ‘address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation’.
In a tweet, the social media platform’s chairman said verified accounts are being limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.
Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to just 300 per day, he added.
In a later tweet, the billionaire added: ‘Rate limits increasing soon to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.’
It comes after Twitter announced users will be required to have an account on the site to view tweets, a move he called a ‘temporary emergency measure’.
Musk has said hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data ‘extremely aggressively’, impacting user experience.
He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using the platform’s data to train their large language models.
In the UK, a peak of 5,126 people complained of problems accessing the site at 4.12pm on Saturday after reported outages started coming in at 12pm, according to the website Downdetector – which tracks online outages.
In the US, some 7,461 people complained of issues as of 4.15pm UK time, the site notes.
#Twitterdown and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with a message saying ‘Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again’.
It comes after another outage in February, when many users were not able to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.
After taking over Twitter, Mr Musk laid off some 80% of its 8,000 global staff – and admitted it resulted in the platform losing a large amount of its functionality.
He also oversaw the scrapping of legacy ‘blue ticks’, which verified a user’s identity and were replaced by a paid-for subscription called Twitter Blue.
High-profile figures and celebrities said the move leaves the platform open to imposters and disinformation.
Users who pay £9.60 a month, or £115.20 annually, receive the blue tick and can make longer tweets up to 10,000 characters.
Other select features available only to subscribers include non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures, making changes to published tweets and seeing around 50% fewer ads.
Twitter has said that the service ‘elevates quality conversations’.
Entrepreneur Musk, prior to buying the platform, revealed plans to turn it into ‘X, the everything app’.
In December, just weeks after the takeover, Musk tweeted: ‘I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.’
The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a poll Musk created and promised to abide by.
In May, Musk confirmed that advertising executive Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBCUniversal, was replacing him as Twitter’s chief executive.
Source: Metro UK
