Elon Musk’s limits on tweets, both in reading and posting, caused a great impact among Twitter readers. After some difficulties and crashes of the popular social network, many users reported that they could not read publications.
The caption Quota limit exceeded began to appear on several profiles and the explanation was given by Musk himself. According to their profile, they have applied time limits to address extreme levels of scraping and system manipulations.
It has not been specified for how long this will be the case or what type of posts will be consuming the daily quota of tweet limits. One of the complaints of users of this social network is the large number of advertisements that appear on their timeline. The concern is because these posts could add to the share of tweets read.
What are the limits on the number of tweets that Twitter users can read?
Elon Musk’s announcement about limits on the number of tweets users can read generated quite a bit of confusion. In principle and according to Musk, verified accounts could view 6 thousand posts per day, unverified accounts 600 and new unverified accounts 300 tweets per day. However, shortly thereafter he clarified that the limits are soon to increase to 8 thousand for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts. Finally, hours later, he informed that the limits will be 10,000, 1,000 and 500 respectively.
At present, no one knows exactly what the current limits are and which publications will add up to this ceiling.
These new limitations were imposed a day after Twitter blocked access to users who do not have an account on the platform, as it required a login to view any publication.
What is the reason for the tweet limit measure implemented on the social network?
According to Elon Musk, both the limit on the number of tweets users can view and the inability to log in without logging in are measures to prevent data scraping. As Musk stated in a tweet, artificial intelligence companies, from startups to major ones, mine vast amounts of information from the web. This includes Twitter, which generates server overloads. “It’s quite irritating to have to bring a large number of servers online in an emergency just to facilitate the outrageous tasks of some AI startups” he stated forcefully.
Data scraping or web scraping is a technique being used by companies for artificial intelligence training. Scraping allows them to obtain large volumes of information for such training in large language models. Some of the companies engaged in this practice are the popular ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft Bing.
On the other hand, it is also true that since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the stability of the social network has been affected. Numerous professionals in critical areas have been laid off, jeopardizing the platform’s infrastructure.
In addition to this, there have also been attempts to monetize Twitter through different measures. The most recent was the subscription to Twitter Blue, which offers not only the blue check mark but also the possibility of publishing longer tweets, among other advantages.
So far, no one knows until when the tweet limit will be implemented or if the intermittencies in the service will continue. We’ll have to wait and see if there will be a reversal or if Twitter has changed for good.
