Last night, a number of users reported being unable to read tweets because they were seeing the phrase “Rate Limit Exceeded,” which led them to believe that the microblogging service had stopped working. They appear to have achieved the new rate cap set by Musk and company, which, as of Musk’s most recent tweet, restricts most users to viewing 1,000 tweets each day.
Twitter has tightened restrictions on how many tweets users may view each day. Musk stated on Saturday that new accounts are only allowed to send 300 tweets each day and that unverified accounts are only allowed to read 600 posts per day. On the other hand, verified users have access to up to 6,000 posts per day.
Why are There Limitations on Tweet Reading
According to Musk, the restrictions were temporarily put in place to combat “system manipulation” and “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organizations.”
Musk highlighted his alarm about the widespread, aggressive harvesting of Twitter data by many organizations on Friday. According to Musk, this practice has become so pervasive that it has a negative effect on the user experience.
Companies that use a lot of data to train language models for artificial intelligence, in Musk’s opinion, are to blame. From start-ups to some of the largest enterprises on Earth, “almost every company doing AI was scraping vast amounts of data.” He finds it aggravating that his team needs to quickly set up a lot of servers only to meet the unreasonable demands of some AI firms looking for exorbitant valuations.
Musk later revealed that these restrictions would soon be lowered to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for users of Twitter Blue who are not verified. For Blue, non-Blue, and freshly enrolled users, the rate limits are now 10,000, 1,000, and 500 tweets per hour, accordingly.
Earlier this week, Twitter started blocking non-logged-in users from seeing tweets. Musk said that this restriction, similar to the usage limit, is only temporary and has also been implemented in response to data scrapers.
