Businessman Elon Muskowner of Twitter, said this Saturday that the social network has imposed temporary limits on the reading of tweets (publications) to avoid “extreme levels of data extraction and manipulation of the system.”
As indicated in his account, verified accounts will be able to read a maximum of “6,000 posts (tweets) a day”, while unverified ones will only be able to read 600, and “new unverified accounts” even less, 300.}
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The announcement doesn’t specify whether that daily tweet count applies to selecting specific posts or encompasses all posts that appear, for example, by scrolling down the home screen timeline, browsing threads, or reviewing tweet replies.
This same Saturday, a couple of hours before Musk revealed those limits, thousands of users reported problems accessing the social network on the Downdetector monitoring page, and they seemed to continue, although to a lesser extent, after the announcement.
On the social network itself, some affected people indicated today that the application gave them the following error messages: “The limit has been exceeded” and “Tweets cannot be displayed.”
This Friday, specialized media indicated that Twitter had closed its content, including tweets, threads and profiles, to visitors who do not have an account, to whom a message appears asking them to register or enter their credentials.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Twitter emergency measure
In this regard, Musk said he responded to a tweet questioning whether it was a technical problem, explaining that it was a “temporary emergency measure” and alluded, as today, to “data looting,” the Verge portal collects.
He also brought up the issue in a response to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who was complaining about “paywalls” on places online, including Twitter.
“Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) were extremely aggressively mining data from Twitter, to the point where it was affecting the actual user experience”he told Sweeney, with whom he engaged in a discussion of “ideas” on how to solve the matter.
