Another Twitter U-turn, Elon Musk tightens Twitter usage

Twitter boss Elon Musk has made another u-turn, this time in the form of limiting the number of posts viewed per user.

In a quest to move users to subscribe to Twitter’s subscription service, Musk announced that users will now have a limited number of posts they can view.

Verified users will see 6 000 daily posts which may increase to 10 000 in the future while unverified users will be restricted to viewing 600 posts per day with hopes for 1 000 posts a day.

If you’re the average Twitter user, 600 posts per day may leave you a little capped come lunchtime which may in turn prompt users to consider the verified option.

A definite restricting move from Musk may translate into more subscribers, especially for those who rely on Twitter’s town square for information, news, and entertainment.

New Twitter account holders will likely see 500 posts a day.

Musk argues the move is to address data scraping and system manipulation by AI companies but it seems users will bare the brunt.

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

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

In addressing the issue Twitter wrote:

To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.

At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.

Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal.

While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone.

At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up.

We appreciate your patience.

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