Twitter claims new limits are to fight bots and bad actors

Twitter proposed several reasons for limiting the number of tweets some viewers could see, such as fighting bots and bad actors as well as data scraping and misinformation

In a separate incident during the weekend, Twitter suffered an outage [File] | Photo Credit: REUTERS

Twitter defends its decision to limit the number of tweets users are allowed to view on the platform. The limits were in place to combat spam and bot accounts that either scrape user data for AI models or manipulate users. Twitter said it did not warn users about this in advance as it would have helped the bad actors to evade detection.

While verified accounts can see several thousand tweets a day, unverified or newly verified accounts are limited to several hundred tweets a day, according to Twitter owner Elon Musk. However, the limits have been changed several times in the past few days.

“Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal,” Twitter said in a statement.

While restricting the readability of tweets could impact users’ trust in Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino, the company chief tweeted in support of the strategy. “When you have a mission like Twitter -- you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform. This work is meaningful and on-going,” she said, adding that the company was working to “ensure the authenticity” of its userbase.

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In a separate incident during the weekend, Twitter suffered an outage that raised questions on whether recent technical difficulties, related to Twitter’s unwillingness to pay its Google Cloud bills, may have caused such down times. It was reported that the payments were later made.