SUMMARY
- Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, introduces temporary post limitations to combat data scraping and system manipulation.
- Verified, unverified, and new unverified accounts face different tweet intake caps, with a hint at an eventual increase.
- Access restrictions coincide with widespread Twitter outages and a new policy demanding user login to view content.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk, the industrious head of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter, announced a temporary limitation on the number of posts users can access each day. This drastic measure, he explained, is to combat excessive data scraping and system manipulation observed on the platform.
He revealed that the daily cap on tweet intake would differ according to users' account status. Verified accounts will enjoy access to 8,000 posts, while unverified ones can read 800. Freshly minted unverified accounts will have an even tighter restriction, limited to 400 posts per day. Musk later hinted that these caps would be raised to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively, without specifying an exact timeline.
The news sent ripples through the Twitterverse, with thousands reporting difficulties in accessing the platform shortly after Musk's announcement. Encountering errors such as "Rate limit exceeded" and "Cannot retrieve tweets," over 7,300 frustrated users reached out to Downdetector with their grievances.
In a concurrent move, Twitter began demanding user login to access content, a shift from its former policy of allowing public access to profiles and tweets. Musk tweeted that this "drastic and immediate action" was necessary due to the alarming levels of data scraping, assuring users that restrictions would be "unlocked shortly."
This is not the first hiccup Twitter has faced recently, with previous outages linked to a message restricting daily tweet limits and problems with accessing links or images. Some of these disturbances coincided with a reported data center closure and significant layoffs at Twitter, steps Musk insists were essential for the company's fiscal stability.
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