By Chris King • Published: 01 Jul 2023 • 21:11
X owner Elon Musk
Elon Musk caused more controversy this Saturday, July 1, after he wheeled out new rules on Twitter.
Initially, it appeared that the social media platform had some sort of glitch, as users all over the globe complained about not being able to access tweets.
It was Musk himself who eventually enlightened everybody when he tweeted: “To address the extreme levels of data extraction and manipulation of the system, we have applied the following time limits”.
Thousands of users reported various problems throughout the day. Messages such as: ‘Sorry, you’ve reached the query frequency limit. Wait a few seconds and try again’, was the most common problem, along with: ‘Something went wrong. Try reloading’.
After several months of negotiations, the billionaire purchased Twitter last October for a total of $44,000 million. Since then, he has done his best to disrupt and modify what used to be a free platform.
His controversial decisions have followed one another. He embarked on an aggressive policy of laying off workers not long after taking control.
After criticising the previous management over the way they ran the platform, Musk immediately trimmed a workforce of about 8,000 down to around 1,500 in a very short space of time.
Musk then implemented the withdrawal of all verified profiles to make them paid – except accounts with more than a million followers. To get the verification badge – or ‘blue tick’ – users must now pay $8 (£6.30) as a subscription each month.
This latest action to ‘temporarily’ limit the number of tweets that users can read has caused a great deal of consternation today.
According to Downdetector, the website which tracks online outages, a total of 5,126 Twitter users had reported problems by 16:12 pm BST. Similarly, at the same time in America, around 7,461 people had reported glitches.
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Originally from Wales, Chris spent years on the Costa del Sol before moving to the Algarve where he is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com
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