Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new restrictions for AI companies scrapping “huge amounts of data,” while announcing new “temporary” limits on the number of posts people can read.
Now unverified accounts can only see 600 posts per day and for “new” unverified accounts only 300 per day. The limits on verified accounts (presumably regardless of whether they are purchased as part of a Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or if verification was forced on Elon folks like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers ) are still valid Allow reading a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.
Musk soon after tweeted that rate limits would “soon” increase to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified accounts.
The restrictions came a day after Twitter suddenly began shutting down access to anyone who wasn’t logged in, which Musk said was necessary because “several hundred organizations (perhaps more) were sampling Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point that at which they interfered with reality. User experience.”
The change is just one of several ways Musk has tried to monetize Twitter in recent months. The company announced a three-stage API change in March that would begin charging for use of its API, just three months after the final rollout of the revamped Twitter Blue $8-per-month verification payment system. Musk has also replaced himself with a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. The former NBC Universal advertising executive was hired to help restore ties with advertisers who had cut spending on Twitter.
As a private company, we know less about Twitter’s financial health than we did before Musk bought it, but Yaccarino’s hiring reflected how important ad revenue is to the company. Restricting access to the site goes directly against the goal of providing opportunities to see the commercials that companies pay to see, but Musk’s monopolistic view of Twitter may be obscuring that.
As YouTube personality MrBeast answeredHe said he’ll see how long it takes to look at 6,000 posts, Musk answered“Should take less than 1 hour and 9 minutes!”
However, he didn’t mention his decision to lay off more than half of Twitter’s workforce since acquiring the company last fall, including people critical to keeping its infrastructure running. The arbitrary layoffs even meant the company had to rehire some laid-off engineers, and it was repeatedly warned that firing so many people — and leaving so many bills unpaid — would hurt Twitter’s stability.