What Is Twitter 'Rate Limit' And How Will Elon Musk’s New Plan Impact Advertisers?

Twitter CEO Elon Musk imposed severe Twitter rate limits, restricting how many tweets users can view in a day. Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter last year, said that he imposed ‘temporary limits’ due to extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. 

In response, Twitter users experienced difficulties searching profiles, topics, and the feed since Saturday, July 1. Twitter users complained that they were not able to view the tweets once they reached the specified limit. 

What is Twitter's ‘rate limit’?

Twitter users getting this message have reached the limit on how many tweets they can read or scroll past. Initially, Musk said that verified users could read 6,000 posts per day, while unverified could read 600 posts, and new unverified accounts just 300.

Later Musk tweeted that rate limits would be 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 500 posts per day for new unverified accounts. 

The Twitter CEO has not indicated when the limits may end. This also leads to significant frustration and surprise among Twitter users. 

The reason behind restricted Twitter usage?

Elon Musk said artificial intelligence firms are scraping the site for data to train chatbots for free. Musk tweeted, “Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.”

Twitter has significantly hiked the prices for its application programming interface, or API, that lets third parties analyze some Twitter data and build tools with it. 

What do experts think about the Twitter limit?

Marketing industry experts believe that Twitter’s decision to impose a temporary limit on the number of posts users can read on its platform could potentially hinder the advertising endeavors of the company’s newly appointed Chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, as per the Reuters report.

The limits are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers already shaken by the "chaos" Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday. "The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone," he said.