Elon Musk Places 'Temporary Limits' on Unverified Twitter Accounts

Elon Musk announced "temporary limits" on all Twitter accounts as tens of thousands of the social media giant's users reported outages on Saturday.

Musk—whose purchase of the social media company last year has come under significant scrutiny amid an increase in outages, widespread layoffs and concerns about content moderation—tweeted Saturday afternoon that he is taking new action to combat "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." The platform will temporarily restrict the amount of tweets users can view per day.

Unverified accounts will be limited to viewing 800 posts each day, while new accounts that have not been verified will be limited to only 400 posts per day, Musk wrote.

Even those who have purchased the premium Twitter Blue will be limited in how many tweets they can view. These users alongside those who are verified will be able to see 8,000 posts per day, according to Musk.

More details about these limitations, including what specifically prompted the change and how long they will last, remained unknown Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Twitter users reported outages Saturday morning into the afternoon, according to DownDetector.com. Reports began increasing around 8 a.m. ET and at roughly 11 a.m. ET. Many users received an error message reading, "rate limit exceeded," referring to the number of tweets that can be viewed.

The change was met with ridicule from the platform's users.

"Hahahaha," tweeted NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who added in a separate tweet that Musk "doesn't know what he's doing."

"The reality is this change has very dangerous implications on journalism and how information is shared in this country and RIGHT before a presidential election. the government was worried about tiktok when the villain is big back elon," tweeted Twitter user @shaTIRED.

"Went from 'free speech!' to 'here's how much speech you can see,'" tweeted Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and congressional candidate.

Washington Post reporter Dave Jorgenson tweeted: "Once again, I am torn. This is so, so dumb ... BUT probably good for our collective mental health that he's killing Twitter."

Even the White House appeared to take a shot at Musk, tweeting, "This President will get every American online." The tweet referenced President Joe Biden's recent announcement that he will invest more than $40 billion into strengthening broadband across the country.

Musk has not responded to the backlash, instead tweeting, "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits."

Musk initially announced the limitations as being lower before amending those numbers. He first said that unverified accounts would be limited to 600, new unverified accounts to 300 and verified users to 6,000 tweets per day.

Newsweek reached out to Musk via SpaceX and Tesla's press emails. After purchasing the social media platform, Musk disbanded the company's public relations team, so no press contact for Twitter could be reached.

The limitations are the latest controversy since Musk's Twitter takeover. Musk announced earlier this year that he would dismantle Twitter's "legacy" verification program, which allowed prominent individuals to be verified to differentiate themselves from parodies or impersonators. Instead, verification now comes from a Twitter Blue account. Meanwhile, Twitter has also seen an uptick in hate speech amid his pledge to prioritize free speech on the platform.

Internal revenue documents reported by The New York Times last month found that advertising revenue dropped 59 percent in the five weeks between April 1 and the first week of May amid these controversies.