'Unverified Twitter accounts can read 600 posts per day': Elon Musk announces 'temporary' limits

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Saturday announced 'temporary' limits on the social media platform to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that the unverified accounts and new unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts per day, respectively.

"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," tweeted Musk on Saturday hours after the social media platform was suffering from global outage. 

On Friday, Twitter said it will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Elon Musk called a "temporary emergency measure".

Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an exiting account to see their favorite tweets.

"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk said in a tweet.

He added that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", affecting user experience.

Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

Twitter users said Musk has "gone too far sell the app".

Last month, Twitter had announced plans to focus on video, creator and commerce partnerships to revitalise the social media company's business beyond digital advertising.

Twitter has also begun charging users to access its application programming interface (API), used by third-party apps and researchers.

The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.