Twitter Imposes Limitations on the Number of Tweets Viewable by Users Per Day

Twitter has implemented strict limitations on the number of tweets users can view in a day. Elon Musk recently announced that unverified accounts will be restricted to reading 600 posts per day, while new accounts will only have access to 300 tweets daily. However, verified accounts will still be able to view 6,000 posts each day. This means that for the majority of users, unless they subscribe to Twitter Blue, they will only be able to spend a minute or two on the platform before encountering an “rate limit exceeded” error. Musk later stated that Twitter plans to relax these restrictions to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for non-Twitter Blue users in the near future.

Musk claimed the “temporary” limits were introduced due to “extreme data scraping” and “system manipulation”. The other day, Twitter started preventing people who are not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Like the usage limit, Musk has insisted that the login limit is only temporary and was implemented in response to data scraping. “Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) scraped Twitter data extremely aggressively until it affected the actual user experience,” Musk said Friday. He later claimed that “almost every company doing AI” is scraping Twitter to train their models. “It’s quite annoying that a large number of servers need to be brought online in an emergency just to facilitate the outrageous valuation of some AI startups,” he said.

Musk didn’t say what “new” means in the context of the account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users for now. He also didn’t say whether watching ads counts towards a user’s viewing limit. In any case, the restrictions severely limit the usability of Twitter, which makes it difficult to verify the authenticity of a screenshot of a tweet, for example. A cynical view of the situation suggests that Twitter is trying to find ways to squeeze as much money as possible from its user base. In March, the company unveiled API changes that could cost some organizations as much as $42,000 a month. However, this move and the introduction of Twitter Blue do not seem to have made up for Twitter’s lost advertising revenue since Musk’s takeover. Limiting the number of tweets and extension ads users see is unlikely to make the company’s remaining customers happy.