Twitter’s new boss has doubled the company’s controversial limit on the number of tweets some users can view, though the move is fueling more discontent among its depleted user base.
Over the weekend, visitors to the site began receiving error messages telling them: “Rate limit exceeded” or “Tweets cannot be retrieved.”
Owner Elon Musk He explained in a tweet that, temporarily, verified Twitter accounts will be limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts will have a limit of 600 tweets per day, and new unverified accounts will be limited to 300 tweets. Proposal These numbers would soon rise to 10,000, 1,000, and 400, respectively.
in tweet On Tuesday, recently minted Twitter CEO Linda Iaccarino defended the platform’s controversial decision, which was met with backlash from users who reported thousands of bugs and sent the hashtag #TwitterDown.
“When you have a mission like Twitter, you need to take big steps to continue to enhance the platform,” Iaccarino wrote. “This work is meaningful and ongoing.”
Its justification for the move came when the company issued a statement informing users of the “price limits”.
“To ensure the health of our user base, we must take aggressive measures to remove spam and bots from our platform,” the company said on Tuesday. “That’s why we’ve temporarily restricted usage so we can detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that harm the platform. Any advance notice of these measures would have allowed bad people to change their behavior to avoid detection.”
Musk, who bought Twitter and took it private in a landmark $44 billion deal last year, has also been a longtime Vocal critic The number of fake accounts – or bots – active on the platform.
After his takeover was approved, he Try to back out of the deal Pointing out concerns that he had been misled about the spread of such accounts.
Twitter said in its statement this week that it is working to prevent fake accounts from doing two things: scraping public data of real users to build AI models, and manipulating the people and conversations on the platform.
It acknowledged that these efforts to clamp down on bot accounts currently affected a “small percentage” of users, and noted that the impact on advertising was “minimal”.
“While this work will never be done, we are all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone,” the company added. “Sometimes, even for a brief moment, you have to slow down to speed up.”
Despite reassurances from Twitter and its CEO, users continued to criticize the company’s latest unpopular move, with some arguing that the platform “It wasn’t worseOthers described it asWhy am I leaving Twitter. “
Twitter The company is very bad at communication in the age of Elon. This blog says nothing, and is out a day past Twitter’s rate limits.
Obviously, Elon still does whatever he wants and whenever he wants. https://t.co/L5WM5QGVO6
– Jack Appleby (@jappleby) July 4, 2023
Well, you failed miserably my friend https://t.co/RZpnzQERGR
– Hurt boyfriend (SaeedDiCaprio) July 4, 2023
Convincing users to join the effort to control the number of Twitter bots isn’t the only major challenge Yaccarino has been tasked with since he took over the company from Musk. Last month.
Iaccarino, a former advertising director at media giant NBCUniversal, leads the company in its quest to rebuild lost revenue due to the 2010s Advertisers exit the siteas a result of the Twitter confrontation accusations to become an “extreme right-wing social network” under Musk’s direction.
It’s not just advertisers who have fled the platform – users of the social network Exit the site in droves When Musk took over in protest of the way the site had changed, with new competitors snapping up.
Recent research too is found that top Twitter users were posting less in the wake of Musk’s takeover, while May study A Pew Research Center revealed that 60% of US users have “taken a break” from the platform over the past year.
The company is also currently competing with consequences Four out of five workers were lost either through mass layoffs or voluntary resignations, while the site itself suffered A large number of technical problems.
Meanwhile, management deals with a series of internal leaks along with the fallout from their owner, the richest person in the world, refusing to pay the company’s bills.