Elon Musk imposes strict ‘Rate Limit’ restrictions on users on Twitter
Elon Musk imposed strict Twitter rate limits on Saturday, limiting how many tweets users can see in a day.
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The Tesla ( TSLA ) CEO, which paid $44 billion for Twitter last year, said he imposed “temporary limits” due to “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
What does “Rate Limit” mean on Twitter?
Twitter users who receive this message have reached the limit of how many tweets can be read or scrolled past.
Initially, Musk said verified accounts could read 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts could read 600 posts daily and new unverified accounts only 300.
On Saturday afternoon, Musk said the rate limits would rise to 8,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts.
On Saturday night, Musk tweeted that the rate limits would be 10,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts and 500 for new, unverified accounts.
Musk has not indicated when the limits might expire.
The restrictions sparked considerable frustration and surprise among Twitter users. They suddenly got messages like “Rate limit exceeded” or “Something went wrong. Try uploading again.”
It doesn’t take long to hit speed limits when scrolling through tweets and replies, even for verified users. Users are able to tweet themselves, and often complain about the new restrictions, but other users may not be able to read these posts.
Why did Twitter restrict its use?
On Friday, Elon Musk said artificial intelligence firms are scraping the web for data to train chatbots for free. “Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest companies on earth, scraped massive amounts of data,” he tweeted on Friday.
Twitter has significantly raised prices for its application programming interface, or API, which allows third parties to analyze some Twitter data and build tools with it.
On Friday, Twitter restricted non-account holders access to individual tweets.
Some observers questioned whether data scraping was the true cause of Twitter’s rate caps.
Since taking over Twitter last fall, Musk has cut staff to cut costs but seen ad revenue plummet. He’s been trying to increase subscription revenue, but $8-a-month Twitter Blue signups don’t come close to making up for the gap in ad sales.
Elon Musk recently appointed Linda Yaccarino as CEO of Twitter. She had been head of advertising sales for NBC Universal.
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Can you get around the Twitter rate limit?
Some services, such as Tweet Deck and Hootsuite, offer a way to bypass Twitter’s rate limits for now. Such services allow users to create different columns for their Twitter timelines (and often other social sites), as well as lists, instant messages, alerts and keyword searches.
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