Twitter on Rate Limits: We Were Forced to ‘Take Extreme Measures’

UPDATE 7/4: Twitter on Tuesday reiterated that it was forced to take “extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform” with this week’s rate limits, and argued that the sudden rollout was necessary because “any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.”

In a blog post(Opens in a new window) not attributed to any specific Twitter employee, the company said it “temporarily limited usage” to go after these bots, suggesting the limits are no longer in place. But it then said “the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete.” So it’s pretty much clear as mud.

The post did not mention specific rate limits. On July 1, Elon Musk tweeted(Opens in a new window) that Twitter would restrict access once people hit 10,000 (verified accounts), 1,000 (unverified), or 500 (new unverified) tweets per day—the third change to those numbers in just a few hours.

“At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up,” the post concludes somewhat philosophically. But this comes as Twitter rival Meta is doing no such thing, with plans to launch its Twitter rival—Threads—on Thursday. To that, Musk remarked on Twitter: “Thank goodness [Meta is] so sanely run.”

Original Story 7/1:
Twitter today introduced a novel and surprising feature for a social network: mandatory rationing. 

Owner and Chairman Elon Musk tweeted around 1 p.m. ET(Opens in a new window) that Twitter would rate-limit viewing, even among users paying $8 or $11 a month for Twitter Blue, “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Initially, Twitter applied the following “temporary” limits:

• Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts/day

• Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

• New unverified accounts to 300/day

After tweeting(Opens in a new window), possibly in jest, that he’d hit that limit himself (“Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits”), Musk followed up 1.45 hours(Opens in a new window) later to say that those caps would be raised: 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified.

With no live count of how many tweets you’ve seen, you won’t know you’re near that threshold until you cross it and get stopped by a “Rate limit exceeded” error(Opens in a new window). 

Sometime on Friday, Twitter also blocked logged-out viewing of tweets on the web(Opens in a new window). That would make it impossible for people to see tweets from users who have blocked them unless they borrow somebody else’s account or create another one. It does not, however, seem to have broken tweet embeds on other sites. 

Musk did not tweet out that restriction but instead discussed it in replies to other Twitter users. 

For example, after Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney complained(Opens in a new window) that this move, on top of other walled-garden moves by other sites, left the internet feeling “increasingly broken,” Musk responded(Opens in a new window) Friday that, “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.” 

None of these replies seem to have named these organizations, although Musk has implied(Opens in a new window) that generative-AI developers are scraping Twitter to feed their large language models. 

CEO Linda Yaccarino, whom Musk had hired to run the company after stepping back from the chief-executive role in early June, had yet to tweet about this as of mid-afternoon Saturday.

This is just the latest in a series of surprises, many unpleasant, at Twitter since Elon Musk bought it in October for $44 billion ($13 billion of it borrowed). The platform had to stop and redo the launch of paid verification for Twitter Blue subscribers, sent the vast majority of its workforce packing in mass firings, ended enforcement of many misinformation rules, invited back many of the worst violators of those rules, had name-brand advertisers flee in response, yanked verification badges from users who had been granted them under the old regime, restored some of those badges to high-profile users who had not asked for the favor, threatened to charge public agencies fees for using its service for automated alerts before walking that back, seen privacy features briefly break without explanation, and suffered multiple outages that included one Saturday morning.

Earlier on Friday, Musk bragged(Opens in a new window) that “This platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week.” Outside researchers, however, have found declining usage since his takeover, while news publishers have also reported getting much less traffic from Twitter. 

Multiple alternatives to Twitter have emerged or are nearing launch—the federated social network Mastodon, the Twitter-esque decentralized service Bluesky backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and an upcoming app based on Meta’s Instagram that will reportedly be called Threads. But they have yet to persuade many of Twitter’s most visible users to take their banter and their business elsewhere.