Elon Musk slaps limit on number of tweets users can read; know what it means

In a move that has sent the internet into frenzy, Musk said Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users can read per day.

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter in a much-debated billion dollar deal, the micro-blogging platform has not been the same. Several changes have been made to the platform and in the months since "things have fallen into utter chaos", as one user put it.

Now, in a move that has sent the internet into another frenzy, Musk said Twitter would temporarily restrict the number of tweets users can read per day.

What does this even mean? And who gets to read how many tweets? Let's find out.

What does Twitter's latest rule say?

Musk, Twitter's executive chair and CTO, said Saturday in a tweet that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation.

Musk had said that several organisations were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience.

It may be noted that, Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, ChatGPT's parent company, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

But why?

According to Musk, this change is temporary to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation."

His clarification came as millions of users across the globe criticised him as Twitter suffered a major global outage, which prevented thousands of users from accessing the social media platform. Earlier on Saturday, Twitter stopped browsing access on its web platform for people without accounts.

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"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users," Musk said.

"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data," he added.

So, who can read how many tweets?

Musk initially said that verified accounts would temporarily be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts and new unverified accounts would be limited to reading 600 and 300 posts per day respectively.

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However, in an update on Sunday, he said that "rate limits" will be increasing "soon" to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts.

After a few hours, he posted, "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k." Musk also said, "Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits."

And what has the internet said?

The internet was unforgiving, and several posts complaining about the new rules emerged following Musk's announcement.

One user pointed out that by "limiting the amount of posts seen by people daily [Musk's new rules] directly affects the livelihood of people who earn money through [the platform] like artists with commissions".

Still others came up with their own explanations to the new rules.

One user said, "The new landlord will only let you see a certain amount of tweets per day unless you pay him for more."

Another user, however, added that the new rules are "not what everyone thinks". "It is not to punish non-paying users," the user said.

And there were memes as well.

Meanwhile, the hashtags #Twitterisoverparty and #RIPTwitter on the micro-blogging platform have been gaining traction.

(With inputs from agencies.)