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Cousins! Elon Musk is back at it again with the back at it again! This time he’s announced a limit on the number of posts each Twitter user can read per day in efforts of “addressing data and system manipulation.”
Users of the platform noticed off back that verified accounts that have subscribed to Elon’s brainchild of Twitter Blue are able to view ten times the amount non-verified accounts can view per day.
Elon originally announced early Saturday afternoon on July 1st, that verified accounts would receive a reading limit of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts per day. He added that unverified accounts would be limited to 300 posts per day.
A few hours later he tweeted that the rate limit would be increasing to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for newly unverified accounts.
Elon then shared another update declaring that the rates for verified, unverified, and newly verified would increase to, 10,000, 1,000, and 500.
According to reports from ABC News, Elon’s announcement came just hours after thousands of Twitter users voiced that they had experienced issues with loading tweets on their feeds. The hashtag #TwitterDown began to trend as users shared that they had received error messages that read, “Rate limit is exceeded.”
Following Elon’s series of announcements Twitter users began to speak on the expected changes.
“Never did I think I’d see a social media app become pay-to-win,” wrote a Twitter user.
Days later in a forwarded statement Twitter’s Business account wrote, “To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.”
They add, “At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.
“Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal.”
Cousins, what are your thoughts on this?