Elon Musk Announces New Content Limits on Twitter, Users Are Furious

The man who has said Twitter under his ownership could be so much more has now imposed limits giving users so much less.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: – Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day – Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day – New unverified accounts to 300/day,” he wrote Saturday.

An hour later, he revised himself.

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Musk also had time for his trademark wit.

“Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits,” he wrote.

Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Talk of limits was a far cry from his jaunty prediction a year ago that “There is so much potential with Twitter to be the most trusted & broadly inclusive forum in the world!”

The limits were not very popular with users.

Putting hard limits on reads is web 1.0 stuff.

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 1, 2023

pic.twitter.com/0vSTQ4e4pL

— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) July 1, 2023

5,999 post left to read

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) July 1, 2023

Brb, gonna see how long it takes me to look at 6k posts

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) July 1, 2023

The Wall Street Journal sought to provide some context, saying Musk’s action “flows from an intensifying fight by Twitter to curb AI companies trying to scrape the site for data presumably used to help train their models for free.”

On Friday, Musk tweeted that “drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”

Late in the week, Twitter was requiring web users to be logged into the site to view website posts.

“Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk tweeted.

“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” he wrote.