Twitter has opened up about the newly-imposed read limits on tweets. The company says it’s an “extreme measure” it took to remove spam and bots from the platform. It hasn’t revealed when it plans to lift the rate limits, which affect unverified users more than verified ones (those with a Twitter Blue subscription).
On Saturday, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced limits on the number of tweets users can see in a day. Initially, he said that verified users could see a maximum of 6,000 tweets every day, while the limit for unverified users in 600. For new unverified users, it’s only 300 tweets in a day. Later, musk increased the limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively.
Musk said that it’s a temporary change but didn’t make it clear when Twitter users can scroll the app limitless again. All he said is that these limits will help the company “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” The firm has now published a blog post with further explanation about the move that hasn’t gone down well with many users.
According to Twitter, this “temporarily limited usage” will allow it to “detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform.” The company didn’t provide advance notice on this move to ensure that the bad actors don’t get time to alter their behavior to evade detection. It added that the change only affects a small percentage of Twitter users, while its effects on advertising have been “minimal.”
Twitter wants to block companies from using its data to build AI tools
Twitter’s plan is to kick out bots that are scraping the public data of its users to build AI models and “manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.” A Twitter employee recently confirmed that the company has removed its legacy APIs to reduce data scraping. This appears to be blocking old tweets from showing up in search results. The number of tweet results on Google Search dropped drastically earlier this week.
Unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t made it clear when the limits will be gone. The company says it will provide an update once the work is complete. “While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone. At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up,” it said in the blog post. We will let you know when we hear again from the social network.