Entrepreneur Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced on Saturday that the social network has implemented time limits for reading tweets to prevent excessive data mining and system manipulation.
According to Musk, verified accounts can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 tweets. New unverified accounts will have an even lower limit of 300 tweets.
It is not specified whether these daily limits apply to selecting specific tweets or encompass all posts appearing on the main screen timeline, including threads and replies.
Coincidentally, thousands of users reported difficulties accessing Twitter shortly before Musk disclosed these limits, as documented on the Downdetector monitoring page.
While the issues continued to a lesser extent after the announcement, affected users received error messages such as “Limit has been exceeded” and “Unable to display tweets.”
In recent days, Twitter had restricted access to its content, including tweets, threads, and profiles, for non-account holders. Visitors without accounts were prompted to register or log in to view the content.
Musk responded to a tweet questioning whether the issue was a technical problem, explaining that it was a “temporary emergency measure” implemented due to concerns about data exploitation.
He cited instances of aggressive data mining that significantly impacted the user experience.
During a discussion with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney about internet paywalls, Musk mentioned that numerous organizations had been excessively mining Twitter data, prompting the need to address the issue and find solutions.
It remains to be seen how these new limits will affect the Twitter user experience and mitigate data manipulation concerns on the platform.