Twitter has temporarily limited the number of tweets each user can read per day. This was announced by the company’s owner, Elon Musk, after thousands of users complained about errors loading the platform’s content for several hours. As Musk himself explained through a message On the same platform, they had to set “time limits” on the activity to “counter the extreme scale of the system’s data extraction and manipulation.” The DownDetector website, which specializes in detecting glitches in Internet-connected services in real time, has been recording user incidents since 1 p.m. (Spanish Time) who are facing problems loading history messages (the timeline) or refreshing the home page warned.
More information
One of the messages users reported when trying to load the timeline was: “Quota limit exceeded. Wait a few minutes and try again. Accordingly Social Networking Policies, the limit quota marks the maximum number of requests allowed in a period. Musk has stated that the temporary caps are as follows: “Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts to 300 posts per day.”
Musk did not specify how long this “time limit” will apply or how this daily tally will be evaluated. That is, when the count begins, when certain publications are selected, when each message consulted in a thread is calculated, or when replies to a tweet are checked, or when already directly adding the messages that appear when traversing the chronology of the main publication appear on screen. In a late-afternoon tweet, Musk stated that “limits will soon be increased to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified.”
To counteract the extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we have introduced the following temporary restrictions:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts per day
– Unverified accounts up to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts up to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
This new change on the social network comes on top of another, according to Efe, which specialized media pointed out on Friday that Twitter has closed its content, including tweets, threads and profiles, to visitors who do not have an account: for these users a message will appear , prompting them To or enter their credentials. When asked by a Twitter user if this was a technical issue, Musk tweeted that it was “a temporary emergency measure,” noting, as he did this Saturday, that it was “on due to the extreme extent of data extraction”. “: “Almost every company that runs AI, from start-ups to some of the largest corporations in the world, has analyzed huge amounts of data. “It’s quite irritating to have to bring a large number of servers online in an emergency just to facilitate the outrageous tasks of some AI startups,” the tycoon said. in a tweet.
According to Portal, Musk had previously expressed dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, using Twitter data to train their large language models. The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Musk-owned Twitter and to boost subscription revenue by including ticks in the Twitter Blue program.
User Complaints
On this occasion, according to DownDetector, the peak of the incidents happened around five in the afternoon and not only in Spain. Incidents and user complaints were reported worldwide: the USA, Portugal, Brazil, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, among others, also reported disruptions in the operation of the social network on this website. Some users reported that when trying to refresh their home page, it was blank and only displayed a message confirming that “some error” had indeed occurred, that “it’s not possible to fetch tweets at this time” or that “something “ What happened went wrong.” During the afternoon, users even managed to trend the #Twitterdown hashtag by reporting the problems the application was causing.
It’s not the first time in the last year that Twitter has faced user complaints about problems interacting with the social network. After Musk took over Twitter in October for $44 billion (around 41 billion euros), the first major failure came at the end of December, when the social network caused problems for tens of thousands of users worldwide. As a result, access to Twitter was blocked and some of its key functions failed, such as accessing the account from a computer or the inability to load certain tweets. In March, the social network went out again and, as on this occasion, although it was possible to write new posts, the history or timeline did not resume them normally.
One of the actions Musk took after acquiring the social network was to lay off more than half of the workforce. This sparked complaints from many observers, as the platform’s systems could be left vulnerable in the event of an unforeseen event.
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