Twitter owner Elon Musk made an abrupt announcement on Saturday morning: the social media service has instituted a “temporary limit” on the number of posts users can read. Verified accounts that have paid for a Twitter Blue subscription can view 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts – the vast majority of Twitter users – can only view 600 posts per day.
Newly registered unverified accounts get even less at 300 a day, though Musk didn’t specify how old an account must be to qualify for that tier.
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Musk explains that the guardrails were created “to deal with extreme levels of data retrieval and system manipulation.” The announcement comes a day after Twitter took action on Friday to block access to the website to anyone who is not logged in as a registered user.
“Temporary emergency measure. We were receiving so much data scraped it was degrading service for normal users! Musk wrote Friday afternoon. He also claimed that “several hundred organizations” were scraping Twitter data in ways more aggressive, which had an impact on the user experience.
“What should we do to stop this? I’m open to ideas,” Musk said. This new daily limit of readable messages seems to be one of those ideas.
It’s still unclear how long these “temporary” limitations will be in effect.
These recent announcements are the latest tumultuous developments in the multi-billionaire’s venture with the social media site, having announced its offer to buy Twitter in April 2022 before formally acquiring it in October 2022.
Musk named Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCU advertising sales manager, as Twitter CEO in early June. Through his new role, Yaccarino oversees business operations with the goal of increasing ad revenue. Along with changing management, Musk has laid off about 80% of Twitter employees since taking over the site. He has since shared that he will try to rehire some of those employees after the platform encountered technical issues, including the poor execution of a live audio event on Twitter Spaces with Ron DeSantis, who took advantage of the opportunity to announce his 2024 presidential campaign.
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