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Twitter has faced backlash from users due to temporary limits imposed on the number of posts they can view, following a statement by Elon Musk. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who acquired the company for $44 billion in December, announced on Twitter that users with verified accounts, who subscribe to a premium service for $8 a month, could read up to 6,000 posts per day. Unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were restricted to 600 and 300 tweets respectively. He justified the decision as a response to excessive data scraping and system manipulation on the platform.
However, Musk later updated the “rate limits” to 10,000 posts for verified accounts, and 1,000 or 500 for unverified accounts, following intense criticism from users. This development coincides with the rising popularity of AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, which rely on data scraped from the internet. Twitter and its rival, Reddit, have expressed their intent to prevent these groups from freely accessing data.
Musk stated, “Almost every company utilizing AI, regardless of size, was scraping massive amounts of data,” and expressed frustration with having to allocate more server resources to accommodate the valuation of certain AI startups.
In an effort to boost revenues and avoid financial instability, Musk has recently introduced broader charges for third parties accessing Twitter’s data. Additionally, the company implemented a change that requires users to be logged in to view tweets, potentially incentivizing more individuals to sign up.
These adjustments caused immediate backlash from users, who reported receiving error messages stating “rate limit exceeded” and experiencing issues accessing further posts. This phrase trended on Twitter, drawing attention to the problem. Former Twitter executive, Esther Crawford, criticized Musk’s decision, tweeting, “Hubris + no pushback – customer empathy – data = a great way to light billions on fire.”
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