Elon Musk starts Rate Limit for Twitter accounts and triggers meme frenzy

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has introduced restrictions on the number of tweets users can view daily, aiming to prevent unauthorised scraping of valuable data from the platform. Users will also have to log in to access tweets and profiles, now, marking a departure from Twitter's previous open browsing policy.

These steps by the 'world’s digital town square' resulted in access and refresh issues among thousands of users on Saturday (June,1) and of course, memes.

What that means is, if one exceeds her or his daily limit of the number of tweets viewed, wait for the next day for your daily dose.

Why?

• According to Musk, the steps taken are to safeguard Twitter's valuable data by restricting the number of tweets users can view each day.
• These measures will prevent unauthorised scraping activities on the social media platform by different AI models, that use Twitter data to feed and strengthen their algorithms.
• Twitter now, also requires users to log in before viewing tweets and profiles, as opposed to free browsing the users could do earlier.
• Despite Musk clarifying that these restrictions are temporary, many users have experienced difficulties logging into the site, leading to widespread complaints.

Frustration and memes

• Downdetector, a website tracking online service, recorded over 7,500 complaints.
• Although this represents a small fraction of Twitter's global user base of over 200 million, the widespread problems caused the hashtag #TwitterDown to trend in certain regions.
• Just when you saw the error, how did you react? This Twitter user is literally us.

• What's more relatable than the 'sad cat eyes meme' in this situation? This!

• After you've exhausted all your tweets and you are cut off.

• And, there is Elon, turning the aapada (calamity), into avsar (opportunity).

• For the final adieu!

• And, when you see your friend scrolling the whole day, you know it already.

 

ALSO READ: Missing Titanic submersible that faced a lawsuit over safety is also a PR disaster for Elon Musk

Crackdown on data misuse

• As seen earlier, Musk has been vocal about combating the misuse of Twitter data, particularly in training artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT.
• He believes that unauthorised data scraping hampers the service's performance for regular users as much of the website's resources are diverted into those.
• Consequently, Musk elaborated on the limitations, stating that unverified accounts would be temporarily restricted to reading 600 posts per day, while verified accounts would have a limit of 6,000 posts. And, if the account is new and unverified, it's just 300 tweets a day.
• However, after the backlash, the threshold was pushed to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 posts for verified accounts.
• Ultimately, Musk settled on allowing 1,000 and 10,000 tweets for unverified and verified accounts, respectively.

Musk, later tried to justify the move, on Twitter, by pointing out the view count(532 M on June 3) in his tweet.

ALSO READ: Italian government offers the Colosseum as venue for Musk vs Zuck showdown