Elon Musk announces ‘temporary limits’ for reading Twitter posts
Written by ABC AUDIO on July 1, 2023
(NEW YORK) — Twitter owner Elon Musk introduced, then quickly amended, new rules to the social media platform on Saturday that set “temporary limits” on how many posts can be read per day.
Musk initially unveiled Saturday afternoon that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day and unverified accounts are limited to 600 posts per day. New unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts per day, he said.
Within two hours of making the announcement, Musk tweeted that rate limits will be “increasing soon” to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts.
The changes were made to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation,” Musk tweeted.
Details of the changes came after many Twitter users complained about issues loading tweets Saturday morning — including receiving error messages saying “rate limit exceeded.” The hashtag “TwitterDown” was trending Saturday as users apparently encountered the new limits.
The website downdetector.com showed a spike in users reporting problems accessing Twitter Saturday morning, with thousands of problems reported by the afternoon.
Since acquiring Twitter in October for roughly $44 billion, Musk has made major changes to the company and its platform.
In an effort to significantly slash costs, the company cut roughly 75% of its 7,500-person workforce, raising concerns about Twitter’s capacity to maintain its platform.
In April, the company began phasing out legacy “blue check marks.”
Now, users who pay a monthly subscription fee and meet certain eligibility criteria can get a check mark and be considered verified.
Musk announced in May that he was stepping down as CEO, after the billionaire entrepreneur pledged in December to step down as the head of Twitter as soon as he found someone “foolish enough to take the job.”
Musk was replaced by Linda Yaccarino, previously the ad sales chief at NBCUniversal.
Musk, who runs Tesla and Space X, said at the time he plans to transition to a role as executive chairman and chief technology officer.
ABC News’ Matt Foster and Max Zahn contributed to this report.
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