Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read, owner Elon Musk announced in a post on the social media platform. 

In a Friday tweet, Mr Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure that was taken because "we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users".

Previously, Twitter had announced it would require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure".

Mr Musk gave no indication how long the measures would be implemented.

The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Mr Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.

How many tweets can users view per day?

Verified accounts, the ones that cost $8 a month, are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said.

Unverified or free accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Hours after his original declaration, Mr Musk revealed that those limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.

Two hours after this update, Mr Musk clarified that the rates would increase to 10,000 verified, 1,000 unverified and 500 new unverified.

Why are Twitter and Musk limiting tweets?

Mr Musk had said hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience.

Mr Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

On Twitter, Mr Musk said the changes were to "address the extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

What does 'rate limit exceeded' mean on Twitter?

It means you've reached the limit for the number of tweets you're allowed to view per day.

Essentially, you've been locked out of Twitter for the remainder of the day, with some users complaining that they're not even able to read their own tweets once they've passed their limits.

The crackdown began to have ripple effects early on Saturday US time, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.

Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.

source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-02/musk-limits-tweets-on-twitter-what-does-rate-limit-exceeded-mean/102551890