Washington: Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced on Saturday that users would only be able to view a maximum of 8,000 posts per day, with the justification that this would reduce "data scraping and system manipulation."
Hours after Twitter users worldwide discovered they were unable to view their timelines or read comments underneath tweets, Musk made his announcement.
According to Musk's tweet, "To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits," which restrict the number of posts that verified accounts can read each day to 6,000, unverified accounts to 600, and new unverified accounts to 300.
Soon after, Musk published an update in which he announced that the caps would be raised to 8,000, 800, and 400, respectively. He made no mention of how long the "temporary" restrictions would be in effect.
Also Read: Xanana Gusmao Returns as Prime Minister, Reigniting East Timor's Independence Flame
Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October of last year, Musk has repeatedly pledged to put a stop to non-human use of the service, such as that of data mining firms. In response to "several hundred organisations (possibly more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience," Twitter has not been accessible to users without accounts as of Friday, according to Musk.
Also Read:
In addition, Musk has been urging users to pay the $8 monthly fee for verification. However, users have not taken kindly to the prospect of ten times as many tweets, and as of Saturday night, "#RIPTwitter" and "Goodbye Twitter" were trending topics in the US.
American leaker Edward Snowden claimed that because he frequently browses Twitter without logging in for security purposes, he is no longer able to use the service effectively. Other Twitter users who follow breaking news stories have complained that, even when verified, they quickly exhaust their allotted tweets when following stories about the conflict in Ukraine.
It is still unknown if Musk will maintain the new limitations. The billionaire predicted that he would end up doing "lots of dumb things" in his attempt to revamp Twitter last year and that he would "keep what works and change what doesn't."