Elon Musk limits the messages that can be read per day on Twitter

Twitter has temporarily limited the tweets that each user can read per day. This was announced by the owner of the company, Elon Musk, after thousands of users complained for several hours about failures to load the content of the platform. As explained by Musk himself through a message on this same platform, they have had to apply “time limits” to the activity to “address the extreme levels of data extraction and manipulation of the system.” The DownDetector website, specialized in detecting mishaps in Internet-connected services in real time, had registered user incidents since one in the afternoon (Spanish peninsular time), which warned of problems loading history messages (the timeline) or refresh the home page.

One of the messages that users reported when they tried to load the timeline It was this: “Quota limit exceeded. Wait a few minutes and try again.” According to social network guidelines, the limit quota marks the maximum number of requests allowed in a period of time. Musk has explained that the temporary ceilings imposed 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 has not specified how long that “time limit” will be in effect or how that daily tally will be evaluated. That is, if it will start counting when selecting specific publications, if it computes each message that is consulted in a thread or when reviewing responses to a tweet, or if they already directly add the messages that appear when descending through the chronology of the main screen. In a tweet late in the afternoon, yes, Musk has advanced that “the limits will soon increase to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.”

This new change in the social network is added, according to Efe, to another that specialized media pointed out on Friday that Twitter had closed its content, including tweets, threads and profiles, to visitors who do not have an account: to these users it appears a message for them to register or enter their credentials. To a Twitter user who asked if this was a technical problem, Musk responded in a tweet that it was “a temporary emergency measure” and alluded, as this Saturday, to the fact that it was “due to the extreme levels of extraction of data”: “Almost every company that does AI, from start-ups to some of the largest corporations in the world, was mining vast amounts of data. It is 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, ”said the tycoon. in a tweet.

According to Reuters, Musk had previously expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter data to train their large language models. The social media platform had previously taken a series of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making checkmarks part of the Twitter Blue program.

User complaints

On this occasion, the peak of incidents, according to DownDetector, occurred around five in the afternoon and not only in Spain. The reporting of incidents and user complaints was global: the United States, Portugal, Brazil, the United Kingdom or New Zealand, among others, have also reported on this website failures in the operation of the social network. Some users reported that when they tried to refresh their home page, it would go blank, only with a message confirming that there had indeed been “some error”, that it was “impossible to retrieve tweets at this time”, or that “ something has gone wrong.” Throughout the afternoon, users have even come to convert the hashtag #Twitterdown in trend when reporting the problems that the application was giving.

It is not the first time in the last year that Twitter has faced complaints from users due to problems arising to interact on the social network. After Musk acquired Twitter in October for 44,000 million dollars (about 41,000 million euros), a first significant failure was already registered at the end of December, when the social network gave tens of thousands of users problems for several hours. the world. On that occasion, access to Twitter was blocked and some of its key functions failed, such as being able to access the account from the computer or the impossibility of loading certain tweets. In March, the social network fell again and, as on this occasion, it was possible to write new postbut the history, or timelineI didn’t pick them up normally.

One of the measures that Musk carried out after taking over the social network was to fire more than half of the workforce. This aroused complaints from many observers, considering that the platform’s systems could be left unprotected in the event of an unforeseen event.

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