Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino Defends Widely Criticized Tweet-Reading Rate Limits

As the new Twitter rate limits drew heavy criticism from its users, the social media platform's CEO made her first public statement regarding this and defended the new feature. The new tweet-reading rate limit was introduced to discourage extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.

Twitter CEO Defends the Tweet-Reading Rate Limits

After its owner Elon Musk announced the new feature last Saturday, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino defended the heavy-criticized feature in a public statement. According to Reuters, this became the CEO's first public comment three days after it was announced.

Yaccarino said, "When you have a mission like Twitter -- you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform." She described the revamped platform with a newly-added feature as "meaningful and ongoing."

While this clarified her stance regarding the heavily-criticized feature, the CEO's statement still leaves plenty of questions about what is really going on.

Yaccarino's statement led to a separate announcement from Twitter regarding the tweet-reading rate limits. The company noted that limits were introduced to ensure the authenticity of the user base. Through temporarily limited usage, bots and other bad actors harming the platform can be detected and eliminated.

Twitter added that if the bad actors had known about these actions beforehand, they might have changed their behavior to evade being detected.

"To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform," the company said.

"At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from scraping people's public Twitter data to build AI models and manipulating people and conversations on the platform in various ways," it added.

What Is Going on?

Forbes reported some potential ideas and speculations about what is really going on with the newly-released limits from Twitter. One reason is that the company has stopped paying many of its bills, and the other was a bug that constantly sends an infinite loop of new requests to the company's servers, which is the cause of the crash.

Whatever the real reason, fewer people will look at lesser tweets, presumably resulting in less advertising revenue. However, Twitter described whatever happened to the company in the past few days as minimal, despite being greeted with skepticism online. It added that advertising has been stable in the past days.

"While this work will never be done, we're all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone. At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up. We appreciate your patience," the company noted.

In announcing the limits on Saturday, Elon Musk said that users would only be permitted to read a certain number of posts per day. Twitter limits verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets each day, while non-verified users are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.

New unverified accounts are limited to 300 tweets. CNBC reported that the update came as a lot of Twitter users encountered error messages when they tried to access the platform.

Musk then eventually said the company would soon raise the number of tweets to read to 8,000 per day for verified accounts, 800 tweets for unverified accounts, and 400 for new unverified accounts. However, he did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.