Let’s go back a bit in memory lane before Elon Musk finally purchased Twitter in 2022 and the back-and-forth reason behind his backtracking on finalizing the deal. Bots! Yes, back then Musk cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. After finally purchasing the company, he pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying'”! And it has now apparently become evident that Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts still rages on after the company on Tuesday said that the recent usage limits on Twitter were implemented to “detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors.” Adding that only a “small percentage” of users are currently affected.
To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.
Twitter Blog Post
The company said the actions are intended to prevent accounts from scraping users’ public data to build artificial intelligence models and from manipulating the use of the platform. Twitter owner Elon Musk announced the limits on Saturday, saying users would only be permitted to read a certain number of posts per day due to “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.”
Twitter billed the restrictions as temporary, and they were tiered based on a user’s verification status on the platform. The update came as many Twitter users encountered error messages when trying to access the platform. “Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal,” Twitter said Tuesday.
