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Twitter Limits Daily Tweet Reading to Combat Data Scraping, Elon Musk Announces
Updated: Jan 5
Twitter enforces tweet reading limits to curb extreme data scraping, Executive Chair Elon Musk reveals in a social media post.
Twitter is cracking down on excessive data scraping and system manipulation by implementing restrictions on the number of tweets accounts can read per day, according to Executive Chair Elon Musk's recent announcement on the platform.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts daily, while unverified accounts faced a cap of 600 posts. New unverified accounts were further restricted to 300 posts per day. However, Musk later updated the temporary reading limitations for verified users to 10,000 posts, unverified users to 1,000 posts and new unverified users to 500 posts, but additional details were not provided.
This decision comes after Twitter's recent announcement that users will need to have an account on the platform in order to view tweets—a measure deemed a "temporary emergency measure" by Musk. The move was a response to the rampant scraping of Twitter data by hundreds of organisations, significantly impacting the user experience. Musk has also expressed dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for utilizing Twitter's data to train their large language models.
On Saturday morning, Twitter experienced a widespread outage affecting thousands of users, as reported by outage tracking website Downdetector.com. At its peak around 11:17 AM ET, nearly 7,500 users encountered difficulties accessing the app.
To regain advertisers who had previously left the platform during Musk's ownership and increase subscription revenue, Twitter has implemented various measures, including making verification check marks an integral part of the Twitter Blue program.
Twitter limits daily tweet reading to combat excessive data scraping and system manipulation.
Verified accounts were initially restricted to 6,000 posts, while unverified accounts faced limits of 600 posts.
New unverified accounts were further limited to 300 posts per day.
Updated limitations raised the cap to 10,000 posts for verified users, 1,000 posts for unverified users and 500 posts for new unverified users.