Musk outrages Twitter user base again in latest push to force subscriptions

Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October for around $44 billion, the changes to the platform in front of the scenes and behind have come thick and fast. Claiming the company was burning through cash, Musk axed 75% of its 7,500 strong workforce, in haphazard cuts that saw some key personnel terminated only to be later rehired. He also upended the Twitter blue checkmarks scheme removing them from legacy accounts that had been awarded to them for being notable and claiming they would now be available to all – for a price.

Since then, Musk has been trying hard to continue to incentivise the uptake of Twitter Blue subscriptions, usually by making a regular account less useful by artificially limiting reach, for example, among other strategies. In his latest transparent attempt to monetize Twitter, Musk earlier today tweeted:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

- New unverified accounts to 300/day

This instantly saw blowback from non-Twitter Blue users who quickly racked up their viewing limits and took to Twitter to express their outrage at the changes. Musk explained that it was a response to limit the ability of ChatGPT and other AI tech scrape user data, however he quickly responded by tweeting the limits would be lifted to “8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified”, to just a few more hours later tweeting that it would be “Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k”. At this stage, Musk has not made clear exactly what he meant in the original tweet by the changes being “temporary” and when the artificially imposed limits will be lifted.

A Twitter Blue subscription currently costs $8/m through the web or $11/m through the iOS. Perks of a subscription include being able to post longer tweets, being able to edit tweets, seeing 50% fewer ads, and longer video uploads among other added functionality – which now also includes being able to view more tweets per day than unverified (non-subscriber) accounts.

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