Over the weekend, several Twitter users were temporarily restricted from reading new tweets as they received a “Rate Limit Exceeded” message. Now Twitter has officially issued an update on the matter and explained why Rate Limits are necessary for its social media platform.
Twitter said to ensure the authenticity of its user base, it has to take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from the platform. It said that’s why it had to temporarily limit usage so it could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. The sudden implementation of the new hard limits was said to be intentional as advance notice would have allowed bad actors to alter their behaviour to evade detection.
As highlighted by Elon Musk a few days ago, Twitter said they are working to prevent some Twitter accounts from scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models. In addition, the move aims at preventing accounts from manipulating people and conversations on its platform in various ways.
According to Twitter, the restrictions only affect a small percentage of users on the platform and they will provide more updates when the work is complete. It added that the impact on advertising for customers has been minimal.
Twitter didn’t provide additional details on what the current limits are and when it will lift the limit altogether. Initially, Musk revealed that new unverified accounts are limited to reading just 300 tweets per day, existing unverified accounts at 600 tweets per day and verified accounts getting 6000 tweets per day. Eventually, the daily limit has been raised to 500 tweets for new unverified users, 1,000 tweets for unverified users and 10,000 tweets for verified users.
Some users criticised the move which is seen as a way to encourage more users to pay for Twitter Blue subscriptions in order to get a higher “quota” to read tweets. In Malaysia, Twitter Blue costs RM35/month or RM369/month per year. Besides setting limits for reading, Twitter has also blocked access to users who are not logged in.
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