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Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is fully on board with Elon Musk’s decision to limit the tweets users are able to see on a daily basis.
“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,” Yaccarino tweeted along with an official statement from the social network.
Twitter released a statement explaining to users that they would be limited on the digital platform in an effort to combat bots and spam.
“To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform,” reads the statement.
Twitter users were taken aback when the social network became glitchy over the weekend. The issues were ongoing with little explanation as to what was happening. According to Twitter’s statement, the company didn’t warn its users beforehand as “any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.”
The objective of the rate limits is to prevent bots from “scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models” and to stop “manipulating people and conversation on the platform.”
“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,” the statement said. “While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone. At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up. We appreciate your patience.”
The initial limits on Twitter had verified users constrained to reading 6000 posts a day, unverified users to 600 posts a day and new unverified accounts could only read 300 posts a day. By the end of the day, Musk reported that the limits were raised to 10k posts for verified users, 1k for unverified users and 500 for new accounts.
Twitter’s statement also comes as Meta preps for the launch of a direct competitor called Threads which will be released on July 6.
