The businessman Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has announced this Saturday in his account that the social network has imposed temporary limits on the reading of tweets to avoid “extreme levels of data extraction and manipulation of the system”.
The new model, as indicated in statements collected by Reuters, is that verified accounts will be able to read a maximum of “6,000 tweets a day”, while unverified ones will only be able to read 600, and “new unverified accounts” less. Still 300.
The announcement doesn’t specify whether that daily tweet count applies to selecting specific posts or encompasses all posts that appear, for example, by scrolling down the home screen timeline, browsing threads, or reviewing tweet replies.
This same Saturday, a couple of hours before Musk revealed those limits, thousands of users have reported problems accessing the social network on the Downdetector monitoring page, and they seemed to continue, although to a lesser extent, after the announcement.
On the social network itself, some affected people indicated today that the application gave them the following error messages: “The limit has been exceeded” and “Tweets cannot be displayed.”
This Friday, specialized media indicated that Twitter had closed its content, including tweets, threads and profiles, to visitors who do not have an account, to whom a message appears asking them to register or enter their credentials.
In this regard, Musk has responded to a tweet that questioned whether it was a technical problem, explaining that it was a “temporary emergency measure” and alluded, as today, to “data looting”, collects the portal The Verge.
He has also brought up the issue in a response to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who was complaining about “paywalls” on places online, including Twitter.
“Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) were extremely aggressively extracting data from Twitter, to the point where it was affecting the actual user experience,” he told Sweeney, with whom he engaged in a discussion of “ideas” about how to fix the issue.
