Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey defended Elon Musk amid backlash over the decision by the social media site’s boss to introduce “rate limits” which cap the number of tweets users can see per day.
“Running Twitter is hard,” Dorsey tweeted on Monday.
“I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense.”
Dorsey, who was CEO of Twitter from 2006 until late 2021, added: “It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.”
Musk announced on Saturday that the site would be limiting the number of tweets that users can view each day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from his social media platform.
The site is now requiring people to log on to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime practice to allow everyone to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for $44 billion last year.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
The Post has sought comment from Twitter.
Thousands of users complained Saturday of not being able to access the site.
Musk said the move was a “temporary emergency measure.”
On Saturday afternoon, verified accounts could read up to 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 600 per day and new unverified accounts 300 per day.
A few hours later, the numbers were updated to “10K, 1K & 0.5K” respectively, Musk said.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet.
He added that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” affecting user experience.
Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Dorsey was succeeded as Twitter CEO by Parag Agrawal, before he and the entire management team was fired after Musk acquired the site for $44 billion last October.