Elon Musk introduces new Twitter restrictions, sparking user fury

The billionaire revealed today he would be temporarily limiting the number of tweets people can read in a day on the popular social media platform.

Mr Musk, who took over Twitter in October 2022 after buying it for about A$68 billion, said that verified accounts are being limited to reading 6000 posts a day.

Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day.

Furthermore, new unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts per day

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said Twitter had imposed the “temporary limit” to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”.

Musk has previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using the platform’s data to train their large language models.

Many logging onto Twitter were met with a message that read “Rate limit exceeded”.

#Twitterdown and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with the message.

The change prevented them from seeing new tweets in their feeds, sending out their own tweets, and even sending a DM.

In Australia, a peak of 467 people reported issues with the site just after 12am AEST on Sunday, with hundreds more complaints being filed through the morning according to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages.

Meanwhile, in the UK, 5126 people complained of problems accessing the site at 4.12pm (1.12am AEST) on Saturday. And in the US in the US, 7461 people complained of issues at about 1.15am AEST, the site notes.

In response to Musk‘s tweet limiting decision, one user satirically said users are now “free” from the addictive app, adding: “See you guys at the park.”

But the billionaire quipped that people will now be able to “touch grass again” in response to the tweet rate limit.

In the wake of the backlash, Musk has twice tweeted the rate limit would increase. First he wrote that verified users would “soon” be able to see 8000 tweets, unverified users would see 800, and new unverified users, 400.

In a second update, Musk wrote the rate limits were “now to 10k, 1k, and 0.5k”, respectively.

However, despite the ongoing disruption to usual services, things are now on the up compared to earlier figures.

It‘s the latest change to the social media platform after Mr Musk faced backlash when he introduced fees for blue ticks in April.

Those who wanted to continue to have an iconic tick would need to fork out up to A$19 per month for a Twitter Blue account.

This premium service not only features that tick but users also get other functionality including being able to edit tweets and post longer messages.

Musk also caused controversy for his actions after he initially took over Twitter.

The billionaire immediately slashed hundreds of jobs in a bid to save the company from bankruptcy and fired senior leaders, including former CEO Parag Agrawal.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and has been reproduced with permission