• by Colin Kirkland , July 3, 2023

Twitter's TweetDeck interface continues to falter since owner and COO Elon Musk announced a new limit on the number of tweets users can view each day, with some users experiencing an empty interface as well as issues with notifications, mentions, likes and more.

On Saturday, Musk addressed a change to Twitter’s tweet-viewing policies without warning, stating that in order “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation,” the platform had introduced limits on the amount of tweets users may read per day, ranging from 6,000 per day for verified accounts to only 300 per day for “new unverified accounts.”

Throughout the day, frustrated users posted screenshots of empty Twitter feeds and complained about their inability to use the platform as Musk increased tweet-viewing limits twice until settling on 10,000 tweets for verified subscribers, and between 1,000 and 500 for other users.

Prior to the limits, Twitter made an unannounced decision to block unregistered users from reading tweets, prompting users to question whether their inability to read tweets was a strategy or a glitch.

Eventually, Musk tweeted that “several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” alluding to the way AI companies scrape social platforms to train large language models.

Twitter’s “temporary emergency measure,” however, has also greatly affected user experience, with verified users hitting tweet viewing limits despite paying a monthly rate to access exclusive features on the platform.

In addition, The Verge noted that these recent TweetDeck failures are also complicating user experiences in more detrimental ways.

“Problems with TweetDeck are likely to create issues for professional and power users of Twitter, who rely on the service to build their brands, promote their work, and––in the case of many newsrooms––as a reporting tool.”