Elon Musk starts Rate Limit for Twitter accounts and triggers meme frenzy
Twitter, for sometime now has been looking to boost its revenue. (Photo: Twitter/Unsplash)
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.
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
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.
Me coming to twitter to see why it says “rate limit exceeded” #TwitterDown 😭pic.twitter.com/fuCR31AhRq
— ّ (@IaintIsiah) July 1, 2023
- What's more relatable than the 'sad cat eyes meme' in this situation? This!
Literally me whole day #TwitterDown #TwitterLimits #TwitterIsDead pic.twitter.com/sRZgSLBlKU
— Ashish (@error040290) July 2, 2023
- After you've exhausted all your tweets and you are cut off.
when I’m approaching the 601st tweet #RIPTwitter #RateLimitExceeded #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/wwFkbMOvF3
— T (@trinawatters) July 2, 2023
- And, there is Elon, turning the aapada (calamity), into avsar (opportunity).
It's not a bug. It's a feature. #Twitter #twittermemes #TwitterDown #twitterlimits #RateLimitExceeded #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/Hj9yJYTgQu
— Souvik Satpathy (@souviksatpathy) July 2, 2023
- For the final adieu!
#RateLimitExceeded
— ... (@kingstar1882) July 2, 2023
It’s time to say goodbye#RIPTwitter #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/QyPqUFVPs0
- And, when you see your friend scrolling the whole day, you know it already.
How did you bypass the twitter rate limit? pic.twitter.com/FEGeWr1dxf
— Mad Men Quotes (@MadMenQts) July 1, 2023
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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.
In yet another exercise in irony, this post achieved a record view count!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2023
Musk, later tried to justify the move, on Twitter, by pointing out the view count(532 M on June 3) in his tweet.