Twitter limits how many posts users can read daily

Twitter has limited how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, Executive Chair Elon Musk has said in a post on the social media platform.

Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said on Saturday, adding that the unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.

The temporary reading limitation will be increasing soon to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post on Twitter without providing further details on when it would be implemented.

Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure."

Musk had said that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience.

Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence [AI] firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data," he said.

Twitter's billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.

Acceleration of AI

The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification checkmarks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.

It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms, and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.