Elon Musk Broke Twitter On Purpose This Time

If you long onto Twitter right now and look at the Trending page, one of two things will happen:

You’ll see that every single trending topic is some variation of “TWITTER DOWN,” except for the ones that have something to do with Elon Musk, or
You will be greeted with an error that says “Rate Limit Exceeded.”

checks timeline: "rate limit exceeded"

checks search tab: "rate limit exceeded"

checks someone’s profile: "rate limit exceeded"

i check my own profile: "rate limit exceeded" #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/Sg9GNrgMjw

— ً (@tylerduran21) July 1, 2023

If you don’t feel like scrolling through 20 gifs of birds hopping on keyboards and miles of passive-aggressive comments to find out what happened, here it is: Elon Musk broke it again.

The infamous CEO logged on at 1:01 PM EST to communicate “fixes” he’d been trying to make to the site, saying:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

– New unverified accounts to 300/day

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Forgetting, for a moment, the obvious issues with this methodology, the real issue is that implementing these new limitations didn’t seem to work – many people have complained that they exceeded the rate limit as soon as they logged on, leading a host of users to believe that either the website was down, or their instance of the app was broken.

In essence, Twitter kind of is broken – Musk is making the app so aggressively pay-to-play with this latest move that he’s rendered it basically unusable to those who aren’t paying him eight dollars a month for a “verified” profile.

This is due to the way it counts views on tweets – simply scrolling past a tweet while you are logged in counts as a “view.” Because of this, it would take some users only minutes to reach the viewing limit, after which they would no longer have access to Twitter.

As one user said, “If they count reads like they count views, I’m done in 7 minutes.”

If they counts reads like they count views, I'm done in 7 minutes.

— Jason Rink (@TheJasonRink) July 1, 2023

It appears, however, that the mass inability to read tweets may, in fact, part of a glitch in installing the new “feature,” not the feature itself acting like a bug simply by working as intended.

As one Mastodon user explained, the way the rate limits were programmed appears to cause the website to continually try to fetch posts that it can’t get, which, on a site-wide scale, would cause incredible strain on the site’s servers.

losing my mind if this is actually the explanation. choosing to believe this as it is the funniest and simplest answer pic.twitter.com/1bG7WdmA0Q

— yuuko from nichijou (@headfallsoff) July 1, 2023

If this is true, it would mean Elon Musk essentially installed a self-destruct feature on his own website.

Users are not happy, and many have once again begun reminding Musk that Twittizens overwhelmingly voted that they wanted him gone months ago.

Aside from the fact that this new rule is annoying and extremely classist, it’s also dangerous: There are many organizations that use Twitter’s ability to quickly disseminate information to large numbers of people in order to get out important, potentially life-saving news.

For example, the National Weather Service in Indianapolis exceeded their “rate limit” on a day when severe and dangerous storms are rolling through the area. Twitter would have been the service’s most effective way to let citizens know of imminent hazards, like tornadoes.

this is beyond incredibly dangerous on a day where we will use this account to try and distribute life saving information to the public #ThanksElon #RateLimitExceeded pic.twitter.com/5cC1NzkPp8

— Jonathan Marcus (@JonathanMMarcus) July 1, 2023

This once again begs the question: How is it that Elon Musk is being allowed, continually, to take a piece of infrastructure that many services have now come to rely on for legitimate means, some of which are even life-saving, and turn it into a pay-to-win playground for his fans and people with enough money not to be bothered?

There are many who believe that the billionaire should be facing more consequences than a potential loss of money for his slow dismantling of something that had come to be used as a global tool for communication and dissemination of information. As it stands, he is not – it’s his business and he’s free to do with it as he sees fit – but he certainly is harming his reputation in a way that he will never be able to repair.

Regardless, this latest move will likely cost him, if he isn’t forced to reverse it, as advertisers will not be pleased to see executives imposing view limit on a site that is partially reliant on advertising revenue.

Moreover, it will likely not result in the uptick in subscribers he so desperately wants – most of the people who do not have blue checkmarks on Twitter at this point are so staunchly opposed to getting them that they would rather move to another, less populous site than pay into Musk’s pockets.

What do you think of the new Twitter rule? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments.