(HorizonPost.com) – On Saturday, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read each day in an attempt to combat computer programs that comb through tweets to scrape useful data, the Washington Post reported.
Musk tweeted Saturday afternoon that verified users would only be allowed to view 6,000 tweets a day, while unverified users would be limited to 600 and new unverified users limited to 300. After significant blowback over the stringent limitations, Musk updated the rate limit twice.
Musk tweeted an initial update changing the limits to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified users.
A few hours later, Musk updated the limits again, allowing verified users to read 10,000 tweets a day, while unverified were limited to 1,000 and new unverified users were limited to 500.
The problems began Saturday morning as Twitter users started reporting that they were unable to use the platform and were receiving a message that they exceeded the rate limit.
CBS News reported that at the height of the problems, there were more than 7,000 outage reports to the DownDetector website.
The temporary rate limiting was not the first measure implemented to combat data scraping.
On Friday, Reuters reported that Twitter enacted a measure allowing only users with a Twitter account to view tweets on the platform.
Traditionally, everyone can view tweets whether or not they have a Twitter account. But on Friday, those who tried to view tweets on Twitter were asked to either sign up for a Twitter account or log into an existing account if they want to see tweets.
Musk explained on Friday that the change was a “temporary emergency measure.” He said Twitter was “getting data pillaged” to the point that service for users was being degraded.
In another tweet, Musk explained that hundreds of organizations were “scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively,” adversely affecting “the real user experience.”
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