Elon Musk places reading limit to combat data scrapers

To address “extreme levels” of data scraping and systems manipulation, Twitter has applied a limit to the number of posts users can read.

Twitter owner and executive chair Elon Musk used his own Twitter account over the weekend to reveal that verified accounts would be limited to reading 6000 posts a day while unverified accounts were limited to 600 and new unverified accounts to just 300 posts.

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/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

The temporary reading limitation was later raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

The news follows last week’s announcement that the social media platform would require users to have an account to view tweets – another move which Musk added would be temporary.

In both cases the measures appear to have been taken to discourage hundreds of organisations from scraping data “extremely aggressively” which Musk claims is impacting the user experience.

However, it comes after the platform has been beset by technical challenges since Musk’s takeover last year. Following the acquisition, Musk fired a significant portion of Twitter’s staff base, and reduced the data cente capacity being used to run the site. Since then, users have complained about various problems including dropping service levels.

Musk has recently objected to artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT using Twitter’s data to train large language models.

Reuters reported that on Saturday Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

In a BBC interview last April Musk confessed that his time in charge of Twitter has been “challenging”.