Elon Musk calls Threads' rate limit 'oppressive' as the Meta competitor added restrictions weeks after Twitter limited users to seeing 600 posts per day

• Meta executive Adam Mosseri said Threads would get "tighter on things like rate limits."
• Elon Musk replied to a ten-day-old tweet to condemn the move as "oppressive."
• Threads was released days after Twitter provoked controversy by adding more restrictive limits.

Elon Musk says Threads' introduction of rate limits "seems oppressive," even though Twitter added similar restrictions two weeks earlier.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said Monday that Threads would get "tighter on things like rate limits" as a result of "spam attacks."

And a few hours later, Musk was poking fun at the move — replying to a ten-day-old tweet showing Threads' rate limits in action. 

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2023

On July 1, thousands of Twitter users were affected by a similar change in policy, which appeared to be more wide-ranging.

Musk had said that "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" meant that non-paying users would be temporarily limited to viewing 600 tweets a day. 

And just days after that, Meta's competitor app was made available for pre-order on App Stores. 

As Threads is still working on more essential features, while Mosseri has posted about moving to publish the app quickly, it looks as though Twitter's rate-limit controversy might have pushed Threads' release forward.

It's been pretty popular, reaching 100 million users in just five days, but it's ironic that Threads is seemingly falling victim to the same change that may have prompted its release in the first place. 

Although there have been fewer reports about users being limited than in Twitter's case, with Mosseri pointing out the possibility for false positives. 

Either way, it has given Musk more ammunition for mocking Threads, as Twitter's higher-ups appear rattled by the competitor's rapid popularity.

He also replied to a screenshot of Mosseri's post about rate limits, laughing and calling it a copycat.

That phrase was also used by Musk's lawyer in a cease-and-desist letter accusing Meta of hiring ex-Twitter staff to create a "copycat" app — which the Threads-creator has denied. 

Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.