Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, 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 the unverified accounts and new unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts per day respectively.

That comes after Twitter had announced that 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 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 had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2023