Twitter limits number of tweets users can read

Twitter is limiting the number of tweets a user can read in a day. On Saturday, Elon Musk tweeted that the social media giant was applying temporary limits to the number of tweets a user can read so as to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.

He said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day while unverified account holders can only read 600 posts per day. New unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts per day.

Later, he increased the limits to 10,000 posts for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts and 500 for new unverified accounts

Though Musk remarked that this exercise was to limit data scraping and system manipulation, he did not state who was doing it. He had however stated some time ago that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience. Musk is attributing responsibility to companies that are utilizing data to train large language models (LLMs), like the ones powering artificial intelligence

So it would seem that these limitations are to put an end to this poor user experience. This development is coming a day after Twitter started preventing “outsiders” from accessing tweets without a registered account.

According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, Saturday morning witnessed Twitter experiencing an outage that affected thousands of users.