Twitter error due to view limiting policy: Elon Musk

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: BBC
1 Jul 2023 23:26
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Twitter has announced that it will limit the amount of posts users can view citing limiting data scraping.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk dances while speaking at a Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at Port de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. (AFP)

Twitter is imposing a temporary limit on the number of tweets users can view in a day, the company's owner Elon Musk said on Tuesday.

Musk tweeted that unverified accounts can read up to 600 posts a day while verified accounts will be limited to 6,000 tweets as newly created unverified accounts will have access to only 300 posts a day.

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

A few hours after Musk announced that verified accounts will now benefit from being able to view 8,000 tweets while unverified and new accounts will benefit from 800 and 400 tweets respectively.

The tech tycoon says that the limits will halt extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, however, this could be viewed as an attempt to force Twitter users into subscribing to Twitter Blue, which costs users a monthly payment of 8$, in hopes of boosting the company's revenues.

On Friday, Twitter forced internet users to log in with their accounts to view content as Musk claimed the step comes as a "temporary emergency measure" to deal with data pillaging, which has degraded service for users.

The new measure has left many Twitter users confused as to why their feeds are not refreshing. A message reading, "Sorry you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again," pops as users refresh their feed, with no further explanation.

Ironically, Musk's tweets that explained the new policy could not be viewed by users who have already exceeded their daily limit.

Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, said that 5,126 people reported that Twitter was down at 15:12 GMT, while 7,461 people in the US did so at the same time.