Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, 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, Musk said, adding that the unverified accounts and new unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts per day respectively.
It comes after Twitter announced that it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure.”
Mr Musk tweeted: “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.”
After Mr Musk’s announcement, the hashtag “RIP Twitter” was trending as well as “Twitter Down” and “Space Karen”.
It is not known how long the temporary limits will last. The issues were first reported around midday today but there were thousands of reports about the site by 6pm, according to Downdetector.
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience.
Elon Musk, who is the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, has previously expressed concern about artificial intelligence firms such as ChatGPT using Twitter’s data to train their language models, The Guardian reported.
More to follow…
