Limiting tweets is the last straw for many – but if you’re staying, try these tips to view more
Over the weekend Elon Musk announced a major change to Twitter, placing limits on the number of tweets users can read per day.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
Within two hours of making the announcement, Mr Musk tweeted that the limits would be ‘increasing soon’ to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 tweets per day for unverified accounts and 400 tweets per day for new unverified accounts. Shortly after, he tweeted again, raising the limits to 10,000, 1,000 and 500 respectively.
Mr Musk explained that limiting tweets was a way to discourage ‘extreme levels’ of data scraping and system manipulation, according to a Twitter post on Saturday.
The billionaire has blamed artificial intelligence (AI) companies like OpenAI, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard for trying to harvest data for training their large language models (LLMs).
Mr Musk had said that hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data ‘extremely aggressively’, impacting user experience.
‘It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation,’ he said.
The Twitter chariman had earlier expressed displeasure with AI firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
By limiting the number of tweets that users can read per day, Twitter hopes to make it more difficult for these companies to collect and manipulate data on the platform.
The fallout from tweet limits
On top of annoying loyal users who have put up with multiple chaotic changes to the platform in the past few months, limiting tweets is bound to affect Twitter’s advertising business.
The social media platform generates revenue by selling ads that are displayed on users’ timelines. If users are unable to view as many tweets, they may be less likely to see ads, negatively impacting Twitter’s bottom line.
The tweet limits were met with mixed reactions from users. While some users were fine with reading just 600 posts a day, others criticised the change, saying that it would make them give up Twitter for good.
Following the announcement, ‘Goodbye Twitter’ was a trending Twitter topic as users threatened to leave the platform over the new change.
Love Island fans, in particular, are unhappy with Mr Musk for imposing tweet limits ahead of Casa Amor drama.
In the immediate aftermath of his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last year, users flocked from the platform to newcomer Mastodon – although it too has seen a drop since.
Since October, Mr Musk has fired 6,500 staff, leaving just 1,500 in place, temporarily changed the bird logo to the dogecoin meme, declared his own dog Floki as CEO, labelled the BBC as ‘government funded media’ and overseen a widely-reported increase in hate speech on the platform.
Still, users have found humour in the current situation, and the platform has been flooded with memes about it.
Some users tweeted they were muting accounts so they don’t waste their precious tweet count on mediocre tweets.
Musk himself has responded by joking about how ironic it was that the original tweet about tweet limits ‘achieved a record view count’.
New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has not publicly responded to the tweet limit, but experts warn it will make her job ‘even harder’.
It is unclear how long the tweet limits will remain in place. Musk has said that they are ‘temporary’ but has not given a specific timeline for when they will be lifted.
Metro.co.uk contacted Twitter and promptly received a poop emoji in response.
Who is affected by tweet limits and is there a way around it?
The tweet limits appear to be affecting all users, regardless of their location or device.
Initially, people found a way around the limit using TweetDeck, a third-party Twitter client that allows users to view multiple Twitter timelines in a single window.
But Twitter has since caught up with the hack and users have reported that TweetDeck’s ability to bypass the limits has been disabled.
It also looks like the tweet limit does not carry over between devices. So, if you reach your tweet limit on one device, you might still be able to read tweets on other devices.
Users are still guessing what counts towards hitting the tweet limit, whether just scrolling past tweets or engaging with them by clicking on them.
Some users have reported that they are still able to view more tweets than the imposed limit by using a variety of methods, such as clearing their browser cache or using a VPN. However, it is unclear how long these workarounds will be effective.
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