Twitter has begun aggressively limiting how many tweets users can view per day. On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means short of paying for Twitter Blue, they can spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a “rate limit exceeded” error.  

Musk claimed the “temporary” limits were put in place to address “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.” The day before, Twitter began preventing people not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Like the usage limit, Musk has claimed the login restriction will only be temporary and was put in place in response to data scrapers. “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said Friday. 

Musk did not say what “new” means in the context of an account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users in the way it’s doing so currently. He also didn’t state if viewing ads counts against a user’s view limit. Either way, the restrictions severely limit the useability of Twitter, making it difficult, for instance, to verify if a screenshot of a tweet is authentic. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.