Elon Musk Imposes Reading Limits on Twitter, Leaving Users Very Angry

Elon Musk has made several controversial decisions on Twitter, and it looks like he made another one as he imposed reading limits on all users. However, what raised several eyebrows are that verified accounts will be able to read more posts than non-verified ones, essentially placing a paywall on reading posts on social media.

While verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts can only see 600 posts a day, which is ten times less than verified ones. This is worse for new unverified users, as NBC News noted that they could only view 300 posts a day.

Musk explained that the change will be "temporary" and was done to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." Since he took over Twitter last year, the social media site has experienced widespread outages.

The changes came after a massive outage last Saturday, which was caused by technical difficulties. This was not the first time this happened since Musk took over the site, as it happened back in February and March. Other outages coincided with reports of a data center closure and mass layoffs.

Twitter Users Not Happy With Elon Musk's Changes

After this most recent outage, users who tried to access content or even tweet via the website or the mobile app were met with error messages that read, "Rate limit exceeded" or "Cannot retrieve tweets." This led over 7,300 people to report issues regarding Twitter to the website Downdetector.

This led to a massive backlash against Musk. as Twitter users complained of not being able to access the site at all due to the restrictions.

However, Musk defended his decision and stated that people misuse Twitter data to train popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. However, Musk did say that the company would raise the threshold to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts.

This apparently did not make users happy so he finally settled with 1,000 posts for unverified accounts and 10,000 posts for verified ones. Still, people on Twitter complained about having these restrictions in the first place.

The Associated Press pointed out that Twitter had already faced backlash over its $8-per-month subscription service for verified accounts. This has proven detrimental to Musk when it first launched, as verified accounts that paid for that subscription service posed as him and began spreading fake news.

Elon Musk Joked About People Complaining About the New Viewing Limits

As users were complaining about the reading cap, Sky News reported that Elon Musk joked about those them, with the Tesla CEO tweeting, "Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits."

Addressing the people complaining, Musk added, "You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family." In another post, Musk also joked, "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits."

READ MORE: Brazil: Elon Musk's Starlink Wireless Internet Is Helping Criminals in the Amazon

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: Elon Musk announces temporary read limits on Twitter - CBS New York