Elon Musk says Twitter will limit how many tweets users can read

NEW YORK - Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, executive chairman Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.

Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Mr Musk said, adding that unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.

The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Mr Musk said in a separate post on Twitter, without providing further details on when this would be implemented.

Previously, Twitter said

it will require users to have an account

on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Mr Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.

He had said that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience.

Mr Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Nearly 7,500 users across the social media platform reported issues with accessing the app during the peak of the outage at around 11.17am ET (11.17pm Singapore time) on Saturday.

Twitter had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left the social media platform under Mr Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme. REUTERS