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What Does Twitter ‘Rate Limit Exceeded’ Mean for Users?

Twitter corporate headquarters building is seen in downtown San Francisco, California, US November 21, 2022. (Reuters)
Twitter corporate headquarters building is seen in downtown San Francisco, California, US November 21, 2022. (Reuters)
TT
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What Does Twitter ‘Rate Limit Exceeded’ Mean for Users?

Twitter corporate headquarters building is seen in downtown San Francisco, California, US November 21, 2022. (Reuters)
Twitter corporate headquarters building is seen in downtown San Francisco, California, US November 21, 2022. (Reuters)

Elon Musk's Twitter has put a temporary limit on the number of tweets that users can see each day, a move that has sparked some backlash and could undermine the social network's efforts to attract advertisers.

The limit, imposed to "address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation", is the latest change by Twitter, which was last year acquired by Musk for $44 billion.

What does the latest change mean and what are the alternatives to Twitter?

How do the changes impact users?

Users cannot view tweets without logging in to the platform. Verified accounts can now read 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 600 posts and new un-verified accounts 300 posts. After that, users will get a message that says, "rate limit exceeded".

Musk has said that limit will "soon" increase to 10,000 for verified, 1,000 for unverified and 500 for new unverified.

He has been pushing to make Twitter's overhauled verified service more attractive. Musk made Twitter verified - special badges that were earlier given to notable profiles - a paid subscription and introduced tiers like gray, blue and golden badges.

Why did Musk put the limit?

Musk said the limits would help tackle scraping vast amounts of data from Twitter by almost everyone - from AI companies and startups to tech behemoths.

"It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation," he said in a tweet.

The technology behind generative AI tools such as ChatGPT is trained on massive amounts of data taken from the internet that helps produce everything from poems to pictures.

What are users saying?

Several Twitter users complained, with "#TwitterDown" and "RIP Twitter" trending on the social network website over the past couple of days.

The limits especially impact accounts run by informational agencies, journalists and monitoring services as they rely on reviewing thousands of tweets every day.

The National Weather Service said it may be unable to see tweeted reports of severe weather and associated damage, and asked subscribers to use its office telephone numbers instead.

What are the alternatives?

Twitter-like platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon are the main alternatives. They saw a surge in users and activity soon after Musk announced the limits.

Bluesky, launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and now in the beta mode, said it saw "record high traffic" on Saturday and that it was temporarily pausing new sign-ups.

Mastodon also saw its active user base swell by 110,000 on that day, its creator and CEO Eugen Rochko said.

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Technology

US Supreme Court Tosses Case Involving Securities Fraud Suit against Facebook

A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen in front of a displayed stock graph. (Reuters)
A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen in front of a displayed stock graph. (Reuters)
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US Supreme Court Tosses Case Involving Securities Fraud Suit against Facebook

A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen in front of a displayed stock graph. (Reuters)
A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen in front of a displayed stock graph. (Reuters)

The US Supreme Court sidestepped on Friday a decision on whether to allow shareholders to proceed with a securities fraud lawsuit accusing Meta's Facebook of misleading investors about the misuse of the social media platform's user data.
The justices, who heard arguments in the case on Nov. 6, dismissed Facebook's appeal of a lower court's ruling that had allowed a 2018 class action led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The Supreme Court opted not resolve the underlying legal dispute, determining that the case should not have been taken up. Its action leaves the lower court's decision in place, Reuters reported. 
The court's dismissal came in a one-line order that provided no explanation. The Facebook dispute was one of two cases to come before the Supreme Court this month involving the right of private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud. The other one, involving the artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia, was argued on Nov. 13. The Supreme Court has not ruled yet in the Nvidia case.
The plaintiffs in the Facebook case claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. They accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. Facebook's stock fell following 2018 media reports that Cambridge Analytica had used improperly harvested Facebook user data in connection with Donald Trump's successful US presidential campaign in 2016. The investors have sought unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock they held.
At issue was whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical.
Facebook argued that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because "a reasonable investor" would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. President Joe Biden's administration supported the shareholders in the case.
US District Judge Edward Davila dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived it.
The Cambridge Analytica data breach prompted US government investigations into Facebook's privacy practices, various lawsuits and a US congressional hearing. The US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2019 brought an enforcement action against Facebook over the matter, which the company settled for $100 million. Facebook paid a separate $5 billion penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission over the issue.
The Supreme Court in prior rulings has limited the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that polices securities fraud.