Executive Chair Elon Musk announced the new restriction on Saturday, saying that it was implemented to deter “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
According to Musk, unverified users would be restricted to 600 posts per day, with new unverified accounts restricted to 300 posts per day, whereas verified accounts were previously limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day.
Eventually, Musk stated in a subsequent post, “the temporary reading limitation was increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified, and 500 posts per day for new unverified,” but he didn’t elaborate.
Musk on Friday described Twitter’s announcement that it would need users to have an account to see tweets a “temporary emergency measure.”Musk has previously said that hundreds, if not thousands, of companies were “extremely aggressively” stealing data from Twitter.
Musk has previously voiced his concern with OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, and other AI companies for utilising Twitter data to build massive language models.
On Saturday morning, Twitter was unavailable for thousands of users, as reported on Downdetector.com.
Around 11:17am ET (8:47 pm IST), around 7,500 people across the social networking platform reported problems using the app.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter took many measures to woo back advertisers who had abandoned the network and to increase subscription income by including verification check marks into the Twitter Blue programme.
