Elon Musk Imposes Twitter Read Caps As Rate Limit Exceeded Warning Persists

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is cracking down on what he claims is "data scraping & system manipulation." According to Okta, data scraping involves pulling a large amount of data from a website, putting it in a spreadsheet, and using it for analysis, reporting, and aggregation.

Under a new system, accounts can only read a limited number of posts per day. As with many things on Twitter since Musk's 2022 Twitter takeover, the system is tiered and those who are currently paying for the service, while still being limited, get significantly more than the unpaid users. When it first went it effect, "verified accounts" (those who subscribe to Twitter Blue) could read up to 6000 posts per day. Legacy "unverified accounts" could view 600 posts per day. Perhaps in an effort to stop new accounts being made and used to scrape the site, new unverified accounts have the harshest limit, and could only see 300 posts per day.

However, shortly after, the tiers went up to 8000, 800 and 400, respectively. There is no word on how long this system will be in place, but there is a chance that it will not be completely lifted, though the caps could be raised addtionally. They could also just be used as another way to force users to pay for Twitter Blue.

These new limits seem to be a direct follow on from the impositions Musk imposed at around noon on June 30. A number of people noticed that Twitter users that weren't logged into an account were unable to view tweets on the platform, and were being prompted to either log in or create an account instead. Tweets from non-private accounts could previously be viewed without a having to log in — provided the account being viewed wasn't set to private. Like Facebook, Instagram, and similar sites — Twitter would previously prompt a login. But that could be dismissed and wasn't an issue if someone wanted to view a handful of tweets.

The changes also have ramifications beyond Twitter. Articles involving embedded tweets, like tweet roundups, will have to rely on screenshots. Unlike today's actions, which were explained via one of Musk's tweets, these changes went under the radar — with no explanation being posted on the company's blog or being tweeted out by Twitter's officials.