In response to escalating concerns surrounding “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation", social media giant Twitter has initiated temporary restrictions on the number of posts users can view daily.
Verified accounts will be subject to a limit of 10,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts and new unverified accounts will face more stringent restrictions, capped at 1,000 and 500 posts per day respectively.
The news follows an array of reported issues on the platform, including difficulties in retrieving tweets, disrupted timelines and "rate limit exceeded" messages.
It comes at a time when Meta is launching a new 'Threads' app this week, which could be a potential rival to Twitter.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified https://t.co/fuRcJLifTn— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Twitter down in certain regions
Over the past few days, these complications have garnered significant attention on Twitter itself, leading to the popularisation of hashtags such as #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail, especially in certain regions.
Real-time outage monitor Downdetector has registered thousands of reports of Twitter outages over the past 24 hours.
According to the outage tracking site 'Is The Service Down,' the issues seem to be particularly concentrated in France, the United Kingdom, Germany and both the East and West coasts of the United States.
Musk refrained from specifying the factors contributing to the substantial data scraping or the origins of the alleged "system manipulation", but did express that Twitter's data was being "pillaged" to such a degree that it was negatively impacting user experience.
AI-powered data scraping
Some speculate that the high levels of data scraping are attributable to web-browsing-enabled AI chatbots like OpenAI's GPT-4.
Twitter's developer documents explain that rate limits are implemented to regulate the amount of requests made to Twitter's application program interface (API).
"These limits help us provide the reliable and scalable API that our developer community relies on," the documents state.
Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey backed these recent measures in a July 2 tweet, pointing out the challenges of running the platform and suggesting the decision was in the broader interest of Twitter.
Dorsey expressed his hope to see Twitter transition to a "truly censorship-resistant open protocol" akin to Bitcoin and Nostr.