Elon Musk Limiting Tweets Available to See by Unverified Users

Twitter was experiencing mass outages this weekend — and now, Elon Musk has explained why … he’s instituting a new policy that limits nonpaying customers to a daily tweet count.

The Twitter exec addressed a massive problem Twitter users at large were experiencing Saturday — namely, the inability to see new tweets, dive into trends or refresh their main feed whatsoever. Everyone was getting hit with the same message … Rate Limit Exceeded.

A lot of folks assumed there was some kind server capacity problem that Twitter was experiencing — not the first time that’s happened under EM’s watch — or that there was just a glitch in the system. Wrong on both counts … which was confirmed by Elon himself.

He wrote … “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.”

He followed that up with a trollish joke, saying that people were hitting their rate limits by reading all the tweets about the rate limits being exceeded — but then changed his mind on the drop of a hat (again) by promising to up the count on all fronts by a smidge.

He says verified users will soon get 8,000 tweets per day, unverified users will get 800 and new unverified users will get 400. Bottom line, he’s setting a hard cap at the amount of tweets people can see in a day … which is getting A LOT of pushback and backlash.

This appears to be yet another play to get people to sign up for Twitter Blue and pay to be verified — something EM and co. have been trying to do for months now since rolling out the new service … and coming up short on interested customers. Twitter Blue costs $8/month.

Of course, this comes in the wake of news a couple months ago that Twitter’s valuation had been slashed by at least a third since the Musk takeover. He bought it for $44 billion, but it’s now reported to be worth between $8 and $15 billion … and Elon’s also been forthright about economic challenges of late, including getting new advertisers and streams of revenue.

Now he’s put his user base into a corner and is forcing their hand. As a result, several Twitter users are considering other options — and the “death” of Twitter is trending too.