Twitter is implementing limits on the number of tweets users can read in a day, announced Elon Musk on Saturday, triggering a storm of reactions on the social network.
In an initial tweet, Musk said that users of unverified accounts could read a maximum of 600 posts per day; for new unverified accounts, the figure would be 300, and 6,000 for verified accounts. Hours later, in response to the widespread discontent caused by the measure among users, Musk updated the figures, stating that it would be 10,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for new unverified accounts.
On Saturday afternoon, the hashtag #RIPTwitter was trending in the United States on the platform itself.
Musk indicated that the temporary limits were imposed to address “extreme levels of data theft and system manipulation.”
He did not explain what he meant by “system manipulation” in this context. Data theft or scraping refers to a process by which a program extracts information from a website massively and exports it.
“We were being plundered for so much data that it was degrading the experience for regular users,” Musk advanced on Friday after users encountered a screen asking them to register to view Twitter content.
Musk described the decision as a “temporary emergency measure.”
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