Twitter's rate limits may be driven by financial issues and are likely an attempt by Elon Musk to cut costs, ex-employee says
- A former Twitter worker said the introduction of rate limits is likely an attempt at cost-cutting.
- Rumman Chowdhury told BBC News she thought it was due to Elon Musk's "lack of payment of his bills."
A former Twitter employee says Elon Musk's controversial rate limits are likely an attempt at cost-cutting.
Last week, Musk announced he was limiting the number of tweets users could read each day and blocking unregistered users from accessing the platform. Musk blamed the sudden rule changes on levels of "data scraping" and "system manipulation."
Rumman Chowdhury, an ex-Twitter employee who left the company in November, told BBC News it was unclear if AI companies' data scraping was behind the policy changes.
"Frankly, I think I'm in a majority of people who believe that it's due to his lack of payment of his bills," she told the news outlet, "and he's attempting to reduce his costs."
Representatives for Twitter did not address the question when approached for comment by Insider outside of normal working hours.
Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, also expressed skepticism in a Saturday post to Twitter rival, Bluesky.
Roth wrote: "Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine."
"It just doesn't pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login," he added, in reference to Musk's decision to block unregistered users from viewing tweets.
Some Twitter users have lashed out over the rate limits, despite Musk stating that the change is temporary. Monitoring services and informational agencies, for example, have said the rule change makes it difficult to do their jobs.
Chowdhury told BBC News the tactic was "very extreme and unprecedented" and likely "already failing."