Elon Musk Announces Twitter’s Tweet Reading Limits: User Restrictions

The controversy of Twitter has been the tittle-tattle of the industry ever since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took over its helm. Last week, social media giant Twitter rolled out new regulations for users accessing its platform without being logged in to an account. And another hiccup now is that Elon Musk has enforced Twitter tweets’ reading limits – a restriction that has extended the outage that has impeded users’ ability to track new posts. 

Twitter’s contemporary Meta Platforms,  is reportedly geared up to launch its rival to the Blue Birdie app. 

Twitter Tweet Reading Limits: User Restrictions by Elon Musk

Musk has been shoved as Twitter’s worst year of decisions after he decimated the workforce, alienated its users, and solidified his intentions of solely monetizing the platform. 

In his announcement for Twitter’s reading restrictions, Musk specified that unverified accounts will be able to view only 600 posts per day, while ‘new’ unverified accounts will be restricted to 300 tweets in a day. Amidst the dissension for the Twitter Blue subscription charges of $8 per month and the question of whether they’re granted through an organization or if Musk has forced accounts with more than a million followers to purchase it, the verified accounts will be allowed to read a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.

Shortly after this, Musk tweeted back-to-back that Twitter’s daily tweet limits would be pushed to increase to 500 for unverified, 1,000 for new unverified, and 10,000 for verified accounts. 

(Image Courtesy – Freepik)

Elon Musk’s restrictions and haphazard layoffs led to a lot of instability with important engineers being fired, who later had to be rehired.  

“It would be expected to see significant public outage with Twitter’s technology within six months.”  

On his mission to severely monetize Twitter, an announcement regarding a three-tier API change that entailed charging for using Twitter’s API surfaced in March. Musk also hired Linda Yaccarino as CEO, the former ad executive from NBC Universal to restore advertisers’ relationships with those who had cut down their advertising spending.

But again, Musk’s monopolistic view has caused Twitter’s outage over its tweet restrictions because limiting access to the platform is inversely proportional to creating opportunities for advertisers with their paid ad spots.

Temporary Tweet Limits On Twitter 

Elon Musk has condemned AI companies scraping ‘vast amounts of data’ and has blamed the consequence on the temporary tweet limits on Twitter.

“Several hundred organizations were scraping Twitter data aggressively, to a point where the system manipulation started affecting the real user- experience.”

Musk had previously expressed his concerns about data scraping with companies trying to ingest data to train AI LLMs (like ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing). He even threatened Microsoft with a lawsuit for ‘illegally’ using Twitter’s data after the tech giant reportedly decided to drop the platform from its social-media scheduling advertising platform. 

Only time will tell how the platform grapples with its user’s outrage over Twitter’s reading restrictions. Recently, a bug in Twitter’s web application has been sending requests to the platform in an infinite loop. The problem has materialized from within the organization and thousands of users complained on Saturday that their feed was greeted with a ‘rate limit exceeded’ message instead of populating it with new tweets. 

Many more technical glitches may arise should Twitter decide not to find a versatile approach to the issues and just try to keep gluing the situation with unorthodox solutions.