Twitter is temporarily lowering the maximum number of tweets a person can read in a day. For example, the ceiling for verified accounts has been set at 6,000 tweets per day. Elon Musk, the owner of the microblogging service, says he wants to prevent ‘data scraping and system manipulation’ in this way.
The CEO announced the news last weekend via his Twitter account.
Musk announces temporary daily limits
Twitter users with a Blue subscription will soon be able to read only 6,000 messages in a day. Users without a verified account – people who don’t pay to use Twitter – are capped at 600 daily tweets. New users without a verified account are only allowed to read 300 messages per day.
Musk emphasizes that this is a temporary measure. In another tweet, he says the maximum number of messages one can read in a day will be increased “soon” to 8,000 for those with a Blue subscription. Twitter users who have been using the service for some time and new members without a verified account can then read 800 and 400 messages per day, respectively.
Until recently, the limits were 10,000 messages per day for paying users, 1,000 tweets for free users, and 500 tweets for new members without a verified account.
Twitter users not happy with daily limits
According to Musk, this temporary measure is badly needed. In this way, he says he wants to do something against the “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” that take place on the platform. The CEO recently complained about OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. The company would collect data from Twitter on a large scale to train its language models. This is not only at the expense of the privacy of Twitter users but also puts tremendous pressure on the platform, according to Musk. And that, in turn, does not benefit the service of the microblog.
Users could have received the news of the temporary daily limits. Musk would abuse the measure to encourage Twitter users to purchase a paid Blue subscription. A user posted a tombstone with Twitter’s logo on his timeline. Another Twitter user posted an image of Twitter’s bird falling off the ravine. This suggests that Twitter is in a downward spiral.
The hashtag #RIPTwitter was trending on Twitter on Sunday with more than 75,000 tweets.