Musk: Twitter Will Limit How Many Tweets Users Can Read

Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read in order to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, owner Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.

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

However, an hour after Musk’s tweet that unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts and verified to 6,000 posts per day, the tech giant tweeted that “rate limits” would be “increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.”

One hour after that, Musk tweeted "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k."

Still, users were expressing frustration, expecially those reporting on fire and heat emergencies.

"This really bad, really bad for people who are using Twitter to report on follow fires and other disasters, some friends have already exceeded their limit for the today and the fire weather is just starting for the day. This could cost people their lives, you may want to rethink this or hire me as a consultant! This is a disaster!" tweeted tweeted retired California firefighter Dave Toussaint, who uses his verified account to report on fire disasters.

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 organizations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively," impacting user experience.

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

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 check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.

Newmax staffer Nick Koutsobinas contributed.