Twitter defends rate limiting: Twitter had imposed a rate limit on users a couple of days back and the move was widely criticized on the platform. Rate limit means that the users can only see a fixed number of tweets in a day. While verified accounts can see up to thousands of tweets in a single day as per the new change, the unverified accounts can only look up a few hundreds of tweets. After the changes, many Twitter users criticized the micro-blogging platform and some even began looking for alternatives.
Many Twitter users, on Saturday, complained of being unable to access the social media platform. While some users got the ‘unable to retrieve tweets’ error, others witnessed an error that said that they had reached the Rate Limit for the day. After users started complaining and media reports of Twitter outage surfaced, Elon Musk took to Twitter and announced that they have taken measures to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” and as a result, users will get to see a fixed number of tweets per day.
“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, New unverified accounts to 300/day,” Musk’s tweet read.
At first, the Rate Limits were 300 for new unverified accounts, 600 for verified accounts and 6,000 for verified users. However, in a tweet, Musk wrote that the rate limit will increase to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts soon. And a couple of hours later, he said that the rate limit would now increase to ‘10,000 (for verified), 1,000 (for unverified) and 500 for new unverified accounts. The move attracted a lot of backlash from netizens and some even started signing up for BluSky, a Twitter alternative backed by Jack Dorsey, the micro-blogging site’s former CEO.
Twitter, in a recent blog post, explained why imposing rate limit was needed. The blog post read that the company had to take ‘extreme measures’ to remove ‘spam and bots’ from the platform. The post further says that this is the reason that the rate limit was introduced and if they had given any prior notice before implementing the change, the ‘bad actors would have a chance to alter their behaviour to avoid detection’.
Twitter defends rate limiting: “At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways,” the post added.
