Over the weekend, the bird platform known as Twitter has imposed some pretty weird restrictions on its user base. As announced by owner Elon Musk, users are limited to viewing specific numbers of posts a day, the exact number depending on if they are a paying customer, a regular user, or one with a new account.
In a tweet, Musk says that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. Unverified accounts, or non-subscribed users, only get 10% of that, getting cut off after 600 posts. And if you’re new to the platform, then your limit is 300. Though these limits have been gradually increased, with the latest limits being 10,000, 1,000 and 500, respectively.
Musk says that this is a temporary measure, being done to “address extreme levels of data scraping &system manipulation”. This is likely referring to his prior accusation of companies scraping of the platform to provide generative AI with training material. Which is fair, but if that was really the issue, there’s nothing really stopping such companies from just paying the subscription fee for Twitter Blue if they truly have that much to gain from their scraping.
Those keeping up with this roller coaster ride may have heard of Twitter refusing to pay Google for its Cloud services. While that may have been another reason to limit seen tweets, this is no longer an issue, as a Bloomberg report notes that the bird platform has resumed paying for its cloud infrastructure rent.
All things considered though, with the exception of maybe the previous 300 tweet read count for new accounts, no one should ever realistically run into the issue of hitting the tweet read count limit. For anyone who does, it’s about as good a time as any to reconsider some life choices and priorities.
(Source: Elon Musk / Twitter [1], [2], [3], Bloomberg)
