Musk said on Saturday that unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.
Twitter has placed a temporary limit on the number of tweets users can read in a day, the owner of the social network, Elon Musk, said on Saturday (1/7).
In a tweet he authored, Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts per day.
For new unverified accounts, reading is limited to 300 tweets. Meanwhile, accounts with “verified” status are currently limited to reading 6,000 posts per day.
Musk said the temporary limits relate to “extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation.”
Data scraping is a process where information is taken from a website and imported into another program. Musk has not elaborated, nor explained what is meant by “system manipulation” in this context.
Later, after complaints from users, Musk added that reading limits “soon” should be increased to 800 tweets per day for unverified accounts, 400 for new unverified accounts, and 8,000 for verified accounts.
On Friday, those attempting to access Twitter were told they had to log in to view content on the platform. The cap was an “emergency temporary measure,” Musk said at the time.
It said the social media platform “had such looted data” that it “degraded the service for regular users”.
According to the website Downdetector, which tracks online service outages, a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK on Saturday afternoon.
In the United States, approximately 7,461 people reported breakdowns during the same period.
The comings and goings of the verified ones
Marked by a blue checkmark, “verified” status was granted free of charge by Twitter to high-profile accounts — such as celebrities, businesses and journalists — before Musk took over as boss.
Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee of $8 (about R$38) per month to get verified, and it is possible to get the status regardless of the nature of your profile.
Some high-visibility accounts still have a verified badge despite not paying for it, though many temporarily lost their blue badges in April.
Musk bought the company last year for $44 billion (about R$235 billion at the time), after much back-and-forth. He criticized Twitter’s previous management and said he didn’t want the platform to become an echo chamber.
Shortly after taking over, Musk cut Twitter’s staff from just under 8,000 employees to around 1,500.
In an interview with the BBC, he said cutting jobs was not easy.
Engineers have been included in the layoffs, and their departure has raised concerns about the stability of the platform.
While Musk acknowledged some problems, he told the BBC in April that the outages didn’t last long and the site was running fine.
Source: Terra
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