Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is now limiting the number of tweets users can read in a day.

Currently, verified accounts will be limited to 6,000 posts a day, while unverified can access a maximum of 600 a day. Newly created unverified accounts can only read 300 a day.

These rules will soon change, but not be totally disbanded – Musk announced that verified users will be able to view 8,000 tweets a day, with unverified users seeing 800 and newly unverified limited to 400.

Musk announced the new restrictions in a tweet “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation…”

Twitter appeared to be suffering from outages over the weekend, with #TwitterDown trending.

According to the BBC, users were met with the message: “Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again.” This is potentially to do with exceeding the number of tweets they could read in a day, or a wider outage.

Further, according to the BBC, people attempting to access Twitter were told they would need to log into an account – previously people could view public tweets without a Twitter account.

Limiting the number of tweets users could view would limit site traffic and the number of advertisements users could view, driving down revenue for the site overall.

The change is among a number of confounding measures Musk introduced since taking over the company in October 2022.

Musk reformed the verification ‘blue tick’ service for public figures, turning it into a paid for service. He also laid off around 80% of his workforce, which greatly impacted the sites’ functionality, leading to outages.

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The concerns over data scraping of the new measure may have to do with Twitter’s new policy on its Application Programming Interface (API) access, which now charges people to view the source of tweet data.

Twitter is not the only site to change its API policy – Reddit is set to start charging third party developers for API access to its site, leading to major blackouts across the forum.