LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, has temporarily restricted how many tweets users may view each day. This change has drawn criticism and may harm the social network’s efforts to draw advertisers.
The restriction is Twitter’s most recent move after Musk bought the company last year for $44 billion (about Rs. 3,60,550 crore), citing the need to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
Tweets cannot be viewed by those who are not logged into the platform. Verified accounts can now read 6,000 posts each day, compared to 600 for unverified accounts and 300 for newly created unverified accounts.
Users will then see a notification that reads “rate limit exceeded” after that.
That cap will “soon” rise to 10,000 for verified accounts, 1,000 for unconfirmed accounts, and 500 for new unverified accounts, according to Musk.
Musk added tiers like gray, blue, and golden badges and made Twitter verified — unique badges that were previously awarded to important profiles — a paid membership.
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Musk claimed that the restrictions will make it more difficult for practically everyone, including IT behemoths, startups, and AI businesses, to scrape enormous amounts of data from Twitter.
He wrote in a tweet: “It is quite galling to have to get big numbers of servers online on an urgent basis only to facilitate some AI startup’s absurd value.”
Generic AI solutions like ChatGPT use technology that is educated on vast amounts of internet-sourced data to create everything from poems to images.
Many Twitter users voiced their complaints, with the hashtags “#TwitterDown” and “RIP Twitter” rising over the past few days.
Due to their daily reliance on evaluating thousands of tweets, informational agencies, journalists, and monitoring services are particularly affected.
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The National Weather Service advised subscribers to call its office lines instead of tweeting about severe weather and related damage because it might not be able to view those reports.
The primary substitutes are sites that resemble Twitter, notably Bluesky and Mastodon. Soon after Musk announced the limits, there was a sudden increase in users and activity.
The beta version of Bluesky, a service that Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, founded, reported “record high traffic” on Saturday and said it was temporarily halting new sign-ups.
Mastodon’s CEO and founder, Eugen Rochko, also reported on that day, the number of its active users increased by 110,000 as well.
