Elon Musk is at it again. The man who goes by ‘Chief Twit’ took to his Twitter account to announce more changes coming to the social media platform – which he purchased on October 27, 2022. For unverified accounts that spend a lot of time on the platform, your experience is about to change dramatically.
On July 1, Musk announced temporary limits to how many posts we’re allowed to view per day. That’s right – there’s a new standard for what’s considered ‘too much Twitter’ in one day and it’ll all depend on whether or not you’re paying for a verified account. So far, Twitter users are furious at the announcement.
“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” he said. While verified accounts will be able to read 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts will be restricted to just 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts at just 300 per day.
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Not even two hours after making the announcement, Elon Musk took to his Twitter account again to announce an increase to those rate limits – verified accounts can view 8,000 posts per day, unverified accounts can view 800 posts per day, and new unverified accounts will be restricted to 400 per day.
Three hours later, he took to Twitter again to announce another increase – 10,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 500 posts per day for new unverified accounts. While some people won’t notice the change, others will see their experience cut short daily.
The news comes just three months after Elon Musk announced changes to Twitter’s verification system. In April, the old system was replaced by a new subscription-based system that allows anyone to purchase a blue checkmark for subscribing to Twitter Blue – it costs $8 per month to “verify” your Twitter account.
As for the reasoning behind the temporary rate limits, Musk made the decision in an effort to ‘address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation.’ His tweet was heard around the world and received nearly 530 million views, 112k retweets, 430k likes, 452k quotes, and 31,500 bookmarks.
Is Elon Musk Forcing People to Purchase Twitter Blue?
In the wake of the announcement, many people began to question Elon Musk’s intent behind restricting how many posts a user can read each day. One Fox News host, Joey Jones, described the decision as a ‘shakedown’ that’ll push unverified users who spend a lot of time on the platform to consider Twitter Blue.
Some Twitter users were questioning what constitutes as a ‘view.’ Brian Krassenstein – a journalist and verified Twitter user – asked, “What is the definition of a ‘post read’? Is it clicking on a post or simply an impression of a post? Does a reply count as a post?” It was a question many of us had at first thought.
One user appeared to answer the question. “Viewing it. Hence the view count. Is this stuff really this unobvious to nondevelopers?” Of course, this only spurred another question from Krassenstein – “If I start at the top of my feed and flick down really fast, do all the posts that fly by illegibly counted as viewed?”
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While Musk is blaming the decision on ‘data scraping [and] system manipulation,’ the fact that verified users can view 10x the amount of posts as an unverified user has many questioning Musk’s intent. It’s clear that the decision heavily favors verified users and will force certain users to consider Twitter Blue.
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