Twitter billionaire, Elon Musk, on Saturday, July 1, announced that the social media platform would limit the number of tweets one can view per day to tackle extreme cases of data scraping and system manipulation.
In a statement, Musk announced different limits for paid and unpaid users - whereby verified accounts were limited to 6,000 posts per day, 600 posts for unverified accounts and 300 for new unverified accounts.
The Rate limits were later increased to 10,000, 1,000 and 500 for verified, existing and new users, respectively.
Once a user hits the limit, a notification appears on the page informing the user that either "Something went wrong, try reloading," or "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."
Musk revealed that the move prevents third-party applications from accessing data off the platform. He cited data scrapping as the reason for imposing the daily limits.
The third-party applications included Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps that rely on internet data to analyse human behaviour and enable problem-solving techniques.
Following Musk's announcement, various users shared photos of 'rare limit exceeded', indicating they had surpassed the limits on their home feed.
"They have finally limited me on my Twitter for Web. Today is done. See you lovely people tomorrow."
"Let's just migrate to other platforms," other users suggested.
It is unclear when the Twitter owner will scrap the temporary limit - with many speculating that the move was a ploy to force users to upgrade to a paid account.
Further, international reports indicated that Musk had declined to pay the existing Ksh140 billion contract with a tech company for cloud storage services.
According to Bloomberg, Twitter's new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Linda Yaccarino resumed paying for the essential cloud storage space.
Twitter currently hosts several key services on the cloud storage, and the platform owner seeks to migrate to its servers.
On Friday, June 30, Musk announced that tweets could not be viewed without logging into an account. The move was aimed at driving more people into subscribing to the platform.
