Millions of users around the world on Sunday experienced trouble in navigating Twitter after the platform imposed temporary limits on the number of tweets that one will be able to read per day.
In a Twitter post, Executive Chair Elon Musk said the new policy seeks to address data scraping and manipulation.
“We've applied the following temporary limits: verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; [and] new unverified accounts to 300/day," he added.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
Following the announcement, Twitter issued an official guidelines about the new policy.
Aside from the post limit, the social media platform is also limiting direct messages to 500 a day and following accounts limit to 400 a day.
A user can make changes to his or her account email, four times daily and can tweet 2,400 tweets a day.
Twitter will send a notice to the user regarding which limit he or she has hit.
“For limits that are time-based (like the Direct Messages, Tweets, changes to account email, and API request limits), you'll be able to try again after the time limit has elapsed,” the social media platform said.
It noted that the aforementioned number of limits “may be temporarily reduced during periods of heavy site usage.”
The new policy is applicable to all devices including web, mobile, phone, and application programming interface (API), according to Twitter.
“API requests from all third-party applications are tracked against the hourly API limit. People who use multiple third-party applications with their account will therefore reach the API limit more quickly,” the social media platform said.
