Twitter CEO Elon Musk drew the ire of thousands of users after he announced a temporary limit on the number of posts that can be read in a day.
Musk said the social media company was implementing post-reading limits to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”
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.
Fox News’ Joey Jones argued Musk “picked a fight with America” and called the move a “shakedown.”
“It’s a shakedown. It’s a shakedown to get people… he thinks we’re so addicted to this,” Jones said on “The Big Weekend Show.” He predicted the billionaire made the restriction announcement to incentivize people to sign up for Twitter Blue.
Co-host Raymond Arroyo said the post-limiting was “heartbreaking.”
“Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, said, ‘I am going to be the protector of free speech.’ Well, looking at this move, he’s closer to Xi Jinping than James Madison on free speech,” he said. “He’s completely controlling the speech. He’s limiting not only what you can see, but who you can interact with and how much speech and conversation you can engage in.”
Arroyo added that the move was “very bad” for Musk’s brand and was “break[ing] the hearts” of long-time Twitter users.
Musk joked about users complaining, writing on his Twitter account, “You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends & family.” He also retweeted an Elon Musk parody account that said the reason users were being limited to reading posts per day was that “we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside.”
Co-host Dr. Nicole Saphier argued that the move could be Musk’s plan to help combat the mental health pandemic by limiting users’ time spent on social media.
“If you look at the data, there are people who check their phones thousands of times a day, and it is taking away… That is why we are dealing with a lot of the mental health issues, because especially our younger people, they do not know how to interact with actual people,” she said. “They’re constantly on their devices.”
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