Elon Musk, Implements Temporary Limits on Daily Post Consumption Amid Data Scraping Concerns
Verified Twitter users will now have access to 10,000 posts per day, while new and unverified accounts will be limited to 500, as per the new restrictions.
According to Elon Musk, Twitter’s executive chairman, the platform is implementing temporary limits on daily post consumption due to excessive data scraping and system manipulation.
Musk announced on July 1 that verified accounts can view up to 10,000 posts daily, while unverified and new accounts are limited to 1,000 and 500 posts respectively.
Recent days have seen Twitter users experiencing issues such as tweet retrieval problems, missing timelines, and encountering “rate limit exceeded” messages. Consequently, hashtags like #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail have gained popularity in certain regions.
Downdetector, a real-time outage monitor, has received numerous user reports indicating Twitter outages within the past 24 hours.
While Musk did not specify the cause behind Twitter’s data scraping or elaborate on the system manipulation claims, he expressed concern over the excessive “pillaging” of their data, leading to degraded service.
There are suggestions that AI chatbots capable of web browsing, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, may be responsible for the extensive data scraping.
Twitter’s developer documents explain that rate limits are in place to manage the volume of requests to their API, ensuring a reliable and scalable API for the developer community.
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In response to recent moves, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, defended the decisions, acknowledging the challenges of running Twitter and suggesting they were made in the best interest of the platform.
Dorsey expressed his desire for Twitter to adopt a “truly censorship-resistant open protocol,” citing Bitcoin and Nostr as potential examples.
Outside of his professional engagements, Elon Musk seems to be preparing for a possible mixed martial arts cage fight against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both being billionaires.
