Sanjana B, Pune
To reduce spam on the social media site, Twitter has announced a restriction on the number of Direct Messages (DMs) unverified users can send in a day. People with verified accounts, i.e., a Twitter Blue subscription, will not be affected by this decision.
The social media giant announced this decision on July 22 via a tweet from their official account. This move is a follow-up to Twitter’s previous direct message setting that prevented messages from verified users not followed by the user being approached. These messages will be moved to the “message request inbox”. Meanwhile, unverified users can no longer message people who don’t follow them back.
Although, the number of daily messages a regular Twitter user will have access to remains undisclosed. This move is also a tactic to get more people to sign up for Twitter Blue, a monthly subscription to the social media platform. This monthly paid subscription model which costs Rs. 900 for the app and Rs. 650 for website use, comes with a blue tick to your account, and select features, like Edit Tweet.
Earlier this year, the company also limited the number of tweets users can view every day. Unverified accounts are to be temporarily restricted to reading 800 posts and verified accounts can scroll up to 10,000 tweets. According to Twitter, this decision was “to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the social media platform”.
Elon Musk, the new proprietor of Twitter, explained that the new restrictions were a temporary measure because of all the excessive data.
Elon Musk, now the richest man in the world, purchased the social media giant in October 2022. He has introduced several changes to the platform ever since.