Twitter is limiting the number of tweets that various accounts can read per day in order to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, according to Executive Chair Elon Musk in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
According to Musk, verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, but unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts per day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
Musk said in a separate post that the temporary reading limit was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
Previously, Twitter announced that in order to view tweets, users must have a Twitter account, a move Musk described on Friday as a “temporary emergency measure.”
Musk claimed that hundreds of organisations, if not thousands, were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” negatively impacting user experience.
Musk had previously expressed his displeasure with artificial intelligence firms such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter data to train large language models.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning.
During the peak of the outage at 11:17 a.m. ET, nearly 7,500 users on the social media platform reported problems accessing the app.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to reclaim advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership, as well as to increase subscription revenue by incorporating verification check marks into the Twitter Blue programme.
