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Social media platform Twitter is temporarily limiting the number of posts users will be allowed to read per day after they saw “extreme levels of data cleansing and system manipulation,” according to executive chairman Elon Musk.
In a July 1 post, Musk said the time limits would limit messages for verified accounts per day to 10,000, and for unverified and new unverified accounts to 1,000 and 500 messages per day, respectively:
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Twitter users have been reporting issues on the platform over the past few days, including not being able to receive tweets, missing timelines, and receiving a “speed limit exceeded” message, leading to the #TwitterDown #TwitterFail hashtag trending in certain jurisdictions.
Real-time crash monitoring website Downdetector has seen thousands of user-submitted crash reports on Twitter over the past 24 hours.
According to Is The Service Down, France, the UK, Germany, and the east and west coasts of the US were the most affected regions.
Twitter-citing-extreme-system.png"/>Musk didn’t elaborate on what could be causing Twitter’s data cleanup, and didn’t elaborate on the root cause of the “system manipulation” claim, but said their data was “robbed” so badly that it degraded the user experience.
Some speculate that the excessive “data scrubbing” was caused by AI-enabled web browsing-enabled chatbots such as OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Related: Twitter Suspends Memcoin AI Bot Following Elon Musk’s ‘Crypto Fraud’ Claim
According to the Twitter developer documents, rate limits are set to control the volume of requests to the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API).
“These restrictions help us provide a robust and scalable API that our developer community relies on,” the document says.
rate limit reads
enable in-app DEX
allow us to trade our excess tweet-read balance for cryptocurrency
charge 1% commission pic.twitter.com/uZ4HJxuYq3— Erica Wall (@ercwl) July 1, 2023
Outside of the office, Musk appears to be training for a possible mixed martial arts cage fight with fellow billionaire and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.