What you need to know
- Elon Musk announces new limits for the number of posts viewed per user.
- Verified users can see 6000 daily posts, which can go up to 10,000 in the coming months.
- Unverified users are restricted to viewing 600 posts per day, and later, they get bumped to 1000 posts/day.
After blocking unregistered users from viewing accounts and tweets early this month, Twitter is back with another move restricting the number of posts users can view daily.
The announcement comes directly from Elon Musk's Twitter post, where he mentioned that users with verified accounts could view 10,000 posts per day, whereas unverified users can view 1,000, and the new account holders can see through 500 posts per day. This actually came as a follow-up tweet to another post that stated aforementioned users could view 8000, 800, and 400 posts, respectively.
Meanwhile, the original announcement from Musk stated, "Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day". This will be followed by 600 posts per day for unverified accounts, and new unverified accounts will be limited to seeing 300 posts per day.
Musk says that this new move is apparently to address data scraping next to system manipulation by AI companies, and these new limits seem to be temporary.
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/dayJuly 1, 2023
Here's the full statement from Twitter Business regarding the new usage limits:
"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."
The change in viewing posts is, however, isn't mentioned by Musk as in where the aforementioned users are limited in viewing tweets whether in the "For You" tab or the "Following Tab."
This move appears somewhat to uplift users to get a Twitter Blue subscription in order to get the verified badge right next to their names and the ability to view more posts as aforementioned, aided by the other conventional benefits the subscription provides, like the ability to edit tweets, post longer character tweets, and long-form videos, amongst other benefits.
Elon Musk further shared some new features that are likely to come to Twitter. In a response tweet to podcaster Lex Fridman's tweet in which he shared an idea of having the ability to upload over three-hour podcast video alongside timestamps/chapters, Musk responded that the feature is also coming. There isn't any specific timeline for the feature rollout at this point. If it goes live, it will be similar to what we have witnessed on YouTube videos for a while now.
Twitter is one of the best social media apps, and it has seen a lot of changes lately, and more recently, blocking unregistered users from viewing tweets took users by surprise early this month. This action comes as an addition to an earlier move, which involved API changes that practically ditched third-party Twitter clients, again very similar to what we have been recently seeing with Reddit as well.
