Twitter Explains Reason Behind Sudden Rate Limit

Social media platform Twitter just revealed why the temporary rate limit wasn’t announced by the company in advance.  

Last Sunday, Twitter-owner Elon Musk said there would be a limit on the number of tweets users can see per day to “address extreme levels of data scraping.” Users have criticized the sudden change for being made without any heads up.  

In response to this, Twitter explained in a blog post that any advance notice would have “allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.” 

“At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways,” it wrote. 

In the statement, the company also revealed that the limit will only affect a small percentage of Twitter users, and updates will be provided once the work is complete.  

Twitter also declared that the change’s effects on ads “have been minimal,” after users pointed out that limiting the number of tweets users can read would affect advertisers’ reach.

TweetDeck to Become Twitter Blue Exclusive 

Several Twitter apps were inaccessible to users following the rate limit change, including the tweet management app, TweetDeck.  

To address this, Twitter launched a new and improved version of the app on Monday, automatically carrying over all users’ existing saved searches and workflows, and providing additional support for better composer functionality, Spaces, video docking, polls, and more.  

However, this upgrade comes at a price. 

While TweetDeck has seen improvements, the company revealed that soon only users subscribed to Twitter Blue will have access to the app. 

We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://t.co/2WwL3hNVR2 by selecting “Try the new TweetDeck” in the bottom left menu.

Some notes on getting started and the future of the product…

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 3, 2023

This means regular users will have 30 days to get the blue check and join the subscription service if they want to use the new TweetDeck.