Here is all you need to know about Twitter’s tweet viewing limits

Twitter, through its owner, Elon Musk, has announced tweet limits various accounts can read per day, in a bid to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.

“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 wrote in a tweet.

The restrictions, announced Friday, June 30, began to have ripple effects early on Saturday, causing more than 7,500 users (out of over 200 million) at one point to report problems using the social media service, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. Though, as of Sunday, 9 am, the report reduced to about 300.

The trouble was, however, widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world, including Nigeria.

Musk later increased the temporary reading limitation to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, but didn’t give further explanation.

In another tweet on Friday, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users.“

This is coming after Musk expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

About Twitter limits

In its Platform Use Guidelines for limits, published December 2, 2022, Twitter says “Limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter and reduce downtime and error pages.”

The limits currently on that page are:

• Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day.
• Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets.
• Changes to account email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behaviour. 
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. 

There is no webpage yet for the new policy temporary view count policy, but what is the intention?

Data Scraping

Since the widespread popularity of Generative AI, data scraping has naturally become a more popular topic.

Also known as web scraping, data scraping is the process of extracting data from a website and saving it to a spreadsheet or local file on your computer. It is one of the most efficient ways to collect data from the web, and can also be used to transfer data from one website to another. Some popular uses of data scraping include:

• Competitor analysis: Scraping data from competitor websites can help you understand their pricing, product offerings, and marketing strategies.
• Market research: Scraping data from online forums and social media can help you understand customer sentiment and identify new market opportunities.
• Pricing analysis: Scraping data from product listings can help you track prices and identify price discrepancies.
• Lead generation: Scraping data from contact forms and email addresses can help you generate leads for your business.
• Fraud detection: Scraping data from social media and other online platforms can help you identify fraudulent activity.

It can, however, also be used for malicious purposes such as stealing personal information, used by state actors, or in this case, feeding AI tools.

Read also: ChatGPT creator OpenAI sued $3bn for stealing private data to train its AI

Data scraping can happen in a number of ways:

• A web scraper: a software program that can be used to extract data from websites.
• There are a number of browser extensions that can be used to scrape data from Twitter. These extensions typically work by injecting code into the browser that allows them to extract data from the website.
• A bot is a software program that can be used to automate tasks. Bots can be used to scrape data from Twitter by repeatedly querying the website for specific information.

Before now, Twitter has taken steps to prevent data scraping, such as limiting the number of requests that can be made to the website per minute. However, data scraping is still possible.

How does data scraping affect Twitter?

Data scraping can affect Twitter in a number of ways, including:

• Increased server load: Data scraping can increase the load on Twitter’s servers, which can make it difficult for users to access the website or app.
• Privacy concerns: Data scraping can be used to collect personal information about Twitter users, which could raise privacy concerns.
• Copyright infringement: Data scraping can be used to copy Twitter’s content without permission.

There are reports that in recent years, there has been an increase in the amount of data scraping on Twitter. This has led to concerns about the impact of data scraping on Twitter, as well as the privacy of Twitter users.

The new policy has been met with mixed reactions. Some users have welcomed the policy, saying that it will protect their privacy. Others have criticised the policy, saying that it will make it more difficult for users to track the success of their tweets, while some others say the policy will make it more difficult for users to identify trends on Twitter. And, some others say the policy will give Twitter more control over the data that is available to users.

It is still too early to say what the impact of the new policy will be. However, it is clear that Twitter is taking steps to address the concerns about data scraping and privacy.

Ultimately, the impact of the new policy will depend on how users react to it. If users find that the policy is too restrictive, they may switch to other social media platforms. However, if users find that the policy is helpful in protecting their privacy, they may be more likely to continue using Twitter.

Already, ‘Goodbye Twitter’, ‘Truth Social’, ‘Crowwe’, ‘RIP Twitter’, and ‘Truth App’ have been trending on Twitter, showing that users may be considering switching to other platforms.