Elon Musk is putting up a paid wall of reading on Twitter

Twitter CEO Elon Musk continues to blame the social media site’s new restrictions on “data scrapers and system gamers” as he announced new “temporary” limits on the number of posts people can read. musk chirp Late Friday, he said that “draconian and immediate action was necessary” due to AI companies “from startups to some of the largest companies on Earth” scraping “massive amounts of data.”

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts only 300 per day. Verified account limits (most likely whether purchased as part of a Twitter Blue subscription, given through an organization, or verification imposed by Elon on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with over a million followers) still allow Maximum of reading no more than 6,000 posts per day.

A little later, Musk chirp that the rate limits would rise “soon” to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified tweets, and 400 for new unverified accounts.

The restrictions apply a day after Twitter suddenly began blocking access to anyone who wasn’t logged in, which Musk claimed was necessary because “several hundred organizations (maybe more) have been scraping Twitter data so intensely, that it’s affecting it.” Real user experience.”

When YouTube personality MrBeast answeredsaying he was going to see how long it takes him to look through 6,000 posts, Musk answered“It must be less than 1 hour and 9 minutes!”

The change is just one of several ways Musk has tried to monetize Twitter in the past several months. The company announced a three-tier API change in March that will start charging for use of its API, just three months after it rolled out its revamped $8 per month Twitter Blue verification pay system. Musk has also replaced himself with a new CEO, Linda Iaccarino. The former NBC Universal advertising executive has been hired to restore relationships with advertisers who cut their spending on Twitter.