Twitter owner Elon Musk on Saturday announced “temporary limits” on the number of tweets users are able to read, an announcement that comes amid reports of users having difficulty accessing the site.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last October and took the company private, said in a tweet “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits.”
Verified accounts “are limited to reading 6000 posts/day,” while unverified accounts were limited to 600 per day, Musk’s tweet said at about 1 p.m. ET Saturday,. New and unverified counts will have an even lower limit of 300, he said.
About two hours later, he tweeted, “Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.”
Musk added, in what is a suspected trolling comment about all the commotion on Twitter: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
Then, less than an hour later, Musk sent a subsequent tweet increasing limits to 10,000 for verified, 1,000 for unverified and 500 for new unverified users.
It was unclear how the site was calculating what counted as a read tweet. Also unclear: When the temporary limits, which were still in effect about 9 p.m. ET Saturday, would be lifted. USA TODAY reached out to Twitter for clarification and and received an automated message of a poop emoji, as is standard for the company.
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#TwitterDown was trending Saturday as users apparently ran into the newly set limits by Musk. The website downdetector.com showed thousands of users reporting problems accessing Twitter by Saturday afternoon.
Users reported seeing error messages that said, “rate limit exceeded” and “Cannot retrieve tweets” error messages while scrolling the site.
A USA TODAY journalist on Saturday was served multiple “rate limit exceeded” errors in the Twitter app after scrolling for a few minutes. It was not immediately clear whether this was as a result of the temporary limits or another glitch on the app.
The new viewing restrictions come a day after Musk said he was taking a “temporary emergency” measure to prevent people who are not signed into a Twitter account from viewing any tweets. He said the action was also to combat data scraping.
“This will be unlocked shortly,” Musk said Friday.
Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives questioned the strategy. “It’s changing the rules of the game with no warning and not a good look for the Twitter platform,” he told USA TODAY in an email exchange. “Frustration building among users.”
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Twitter’s advertising business has struggled since Musk took over. He has overseen mass layoffs, loosened content moderation and changed the blue-check verification system instituting a Twitter Blue subscription service.
In May, he hired NBCUniversal advertising sales chief Linda Yaccarino to succeed him as Twitter’s CEO; Yaccarino will focus primarily on Twitter’s business while Musk focuses on product design and new technology. Yaccarino started in early June.
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Twitter users who hadn’t hit reading limits on the social network yet had some opinions. “Sometimes when I tended bar, we’d flick the lights on and off and play annoying music to chase the last stragglers out at closing time,” tweeted author and historian Kevin Kruse. “Twitter feels like that now.”
New York University journalism professor and media commentator Jay Rosen tweeted: “Sounds to me like (subscription service Twitter) Blue is under performing and he thinks this could help.”
Musk’s reason for imposing the limits didn’t hold water with Slava Melandovich, co-founder and CEO of tech job search company JOBITT.com.
“While I understand the need to tackle the issue of data scraping and system manipulation, this approach risks inadvertently penalizing genuine users and restricting their access to information. It might be more effective to invest in developing robust security measures that can distinguish between human behavior and bot activities,” he tweeted. “Also, more transparency around the thresholds that trigger these limitations would be appreciated. This would allow users to manage their activities better without being constrained by daily post limits.”
Soon after the limits were announced, another hashtag began trending: #RIPTwitter.
Contributing: Austin Bogues, Jessica Guynn and Kate Perez.