Twitter announced on Friday that it will impose daily limits on the number of direct messages that can be sent from unverified accounts, in order to cut down on spam, while encouraging users to sign up for the premium TwitterBlue service to receive unrestricted messaging.
“We’ll soon be implementing some changes in our effort to reduce spam in Direct Messages. Unverified accounts will have daily limits on the number of DMs they can send. Subscribe today to send more messages,” the message from Twitter Support said.
Many users took to Twitter to criticize the move, arguing that the restrictions make no sense and are just another attempt to make more profit from Twitter Blue by pushing people to pay for a blue checkmark.
Earlier this month, Twitter “temporarily” limited unverified accounts to reading 800 posts per day, and new unverified accounts to 400 per day, while verified users were allowed to view up to 8,000 posts per day. The company said it was done to cut down on the “extreme levels of data scraping”
Twitter Support, however, says their anti-spam measures have been successful so far, claiming that limiting the Direct Messaging inbox to only verified users, which was put into effect last week, has helped reduce spam by 70%.
Twitter has undergone a major overhaul since being taken over by Elon Musk in October last year. One of the first moves was to introduce an $8 charge for the blue checkmark to make the network less reliant on ads.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bulls**t. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month,” Musk tweeted at the time.