Twitter clarifies sudden move to ‘temporarily’ apply rate limits

SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter has clarified its sudden move to “temporarily” apply rate limits on the micro-blogging platform. The company said on its Business blog: "To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform." "That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform."

It also mentioned that if the bad actors had known about these actions beforehand, they might have changed their behaviour to avoid being discovered. At a high level, the company is working to prevent these accounts from-- scraping people’s public Twitter data to build artificial intelligence (AI) models and manipulating people and conversations on the platform in various ways.

"Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete," the company said.

The platform also claimed that the limits have had “minimal” effects on advertising. "While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone," it added.

Commenting on the clarification, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino on Tuesday said, "When you have a mission like Twitter -- you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform. This work is meaningful and on-going."

Last week, Twitter-owner Elon Musk had said that he has applied temporary limits on who will read how many posts in a day, to prevent data scraping and system manipulation.

His clarification came as millions of users across the globe, including in India, slammed him as the micro-blogging platform suffered a major outage globally, which prevented thousands of users from accessing the platform.