Elon Musk Has Implemented A Temporary 'Read Limit' For Twitter Users
By Taylor Hodgkins on July 1, 2023 at 5:30 PM EDT
Elon Musk has reportedly enabled a limit on how many tweets a user can consume per day.
The CEO of Space X and the current executive chair of Twitter put a plan in place to restrict the number of tweets users can read on Saturday, July 1st after the site continued to experience technical difficulties and outages.
Musk, 52, took over Twitter in late October of last year. Since his October 28th takeover, Musk has overseen company-wide layoffs, acquired a new CEO, and tested new user features.
Users reported experiencing a message informing them their 'rate limit' had been reached. The message read, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments and try again."
Musk then took to his own feed to reveal the message had been a result of a plan put in place to combat the issue.
What Is Musk's Reasoning For Implementing A Rate Limit?
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
Musk revealed in his tweet that the rate limits were put in place to "Address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." These restrictions are reportedly temporary.
Those who are verified Twitter users are allotted 6,000 posts per day before receiving the message. Those users who are not verified are allotted 600 tweets per day, and brand-new accounts that are unverified are given 300 tweets per day.
— jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
He later tweeted "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits," and retweeted a photo of grass originally tweeted by former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.
How Are Users Reacting To The New Rate Limit?
Several variations of hashtags related to the situation have been trending on the site all day. As of this writing, "Goodbye Twitter," "RateLimitExceeded," "RIPTwitter," and "Temporary" are trending.
Users were less than thrilled with the new temporary restriction. Meteorologist Jonathan Marcus tweeted, "this is beyond incredibly dangerous on a day where we will use this account to try and distribute life saving information to the public."
Another user reported he was unable to access his own tweets.
"If we are being limited to viewing 600 tweets per day, how about reducing the number of spammy adverts that appear on my feed every 3 or 4 messages?!? At least 40% of tweets are unwanted ads," another Twitter user wrote.
as someone who uses this app in a significant way to follow severe weather that’s in the area and THIS is the current situation?
is there a sign up sheet to fight Elon in Italy#RIPTwitter #RateLimitExceeded pic.twitter.com/uYRbTphjAC
— T (@trinawatters) July 1, 2023
"men will literally destroy the app they built for $44 billion before admitting they are wrong," a Twitter user wrote, along with a screenshot of Musk's explanation tweet.
Elon just tweeted we limited to seeing 300 tweets per day or something like that. So, I went to his profile to get clarity but it said #ratelimitexceeded. So … how do I get info on the new rule⁉️🤦🏾♂️ pic.twitter.com/J01HqWaCTH
— Leak It. (@RonaldMatters) July 1, 2023