Twitter users unable to view tweets: What Elon Musk’s new ‘rate limit’ is

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

A few hours later, he tweeted an update, saying, “Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.” He then replied to this tweet with “Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k”, suggesting a further revision may happen. 

According to the AP, these restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day once they have exhausted their daily limit. If the amount refers to the tweets one user scrolls past, such limits could get exceeded quickly for active users.

What does data scraping mean?

Musk has blamed data scraping, a practice through which large amounts of data are taken from websites, such as platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Websites can be ‘scraped’ by organisations to retrieve data that can help them keep track of competitors, better understand a specific audience, follow market trends and compare prices, according to a 2023 Bloomberg report.

However, “scraping can pose a privacy risk when it targets personal information such as contact details and runs afoul of EU law if companies don’t make an effort to prevent that through technical and legal means”, it added, saying that in November 2022, Meta was fined €265 million ($277 million) by the EU for failing to protect user data from being scraped by third parties.

Did rates exist on Twitter earlier?

Yes, but only for functions like the number of tweets one could post per day, the number of accounts one could follow in a day and the number of direct messages one could send out to others per day. This was because “limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter and reduce downtime and error pages,” according to the website, basically to not overwhelm the website with too much data.

But no such limit was set on the number of tweets one viewed and until December 2022 views could not be seen for tweets. Only retweets, likes on tweets and quote tweets were visible.

So who can access tweets beyond the limits now?

This is available to verified Twitter users, those who are paying the $8 per month subscription service that was introduced after Musk’s takeover in October 2022 in order to boost revenue.

While Twitter Blue, the paid subscription service, first came about in 2021, Musk has rolled it out with new features at a breakneck speed. Unlike earlier, now the service also provides a user with a verified badge, the blue tick.

But the changes have often been introduced with little warning and often been reversed as quickly, leading to confusion. It is also questionable whether these attempts have improved the revenue options for the company.

Criticism over such practices has also been dodged by the platform’s owner, at times. Musk followed up his recent announcement with a parody account’s tweet that said, “The reason I set a “View Limit” is because we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside. I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used.” He later tweeted from his real account, “you awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends & family.”

you awake from a deep trance,
step away from the phone
to see your friends & family

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2023

Musk had also, previously, said that hundreds of organisations or more were making use of Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, which was impacting user experience. He has also expressed his dislike for artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

(With inputs from agencies)