Twitter Apologizes for Failing to Notify Users of Rate Limiting Ahead of Time
Over the past few days, Twitter has been exceptionally chaotic due to its recent decision to restrict the number of tweets users can read daily. This unexpected move caught many by surprise, as the company claimed it was unable to provide any prior notice to its users.
“We temporarily restricted access to detect and remove bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform,” a Twitter Business blog post reads. “Any advance notice of these actions would have allowed bad actors to change their behavior to avoid detection.”
While some have been skeptical of Twitter’s reasoning for the move, the company says it’s limiting the limit to prevent bad actors from scraping public data to feed into AI models and prevent them from “manipulating people and the conversation on the platform in different ways. . .” It says that a small percentage of users are currently affected by the speed restrictions, and will provide an update once those actions are completed.
It seemed odd that Twitter posted this update on its company blog until the company mentioned that the rate cap has had a “minimal” impact on advertising. Many pointed out that limiting the number of tweets users can read per day would make it harder for advertisers to reach users and make it harder for Twitter to monetize.
The price cap broke most of Twitter’s website and apps, including TweetDeck, an app that many power users rely on. To fix this, the company released a “new, improved version of TweetDeck.” The company is moving all users to the latest version, but there was another twist: Twitter is making the app exclusive to verified accounts, effectively putting a paywall on TweetDeck for most users.
