Elon Musk blames ‘data scrapers’ as he puts up paywalls for reading tweets

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Elon Musk shrugging on a background with the Twitter logo
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk continues to blame the social media site’s new limitations on “data scrapers & system manipulation” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for new unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limitations are being applied one day after Twitter suddenly started blocking access for anyone who isn’t logged in, which Musk claimed was necessary because “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.”

he limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day,

Musk didn’t elaborate on what “new” means in this context — is it accounts younger than a month? A week?

When YouTube personality MrBeast replied, saying he was going to see how long it takes for him to look at 6,000 posts, Musk responded, “Should be less than 1 hour and 9 minutes!”