Twitter to set daily private message limit on unverified accounts, citing 'reduce spam'

Twitter hasn't specified what the daily DM limit will be, a move that hasn't been well received by verified and unverified users.

An even more controversial change is coming to Twitter, with the social media platform introducing a daily private message (DM) limit for unverified users.

Twitter support staff said in a July 21 tweet that the platform would "soon implement some changes to reduce spam in private messages."

"Unverified accounts will be limited in the number of direct messages they can send per day," it said, prompting users to sign up for its subscription service, Twitter Blue.

Twitter did not clarify the daily limit, and the reaction in the comments was relatively negative, with both verified and unverified offering their views on the move.

As of this writing, a popular comment from adam has garnered over 1000 likes and casts doubt on the upcoming change:

"Changes like this are why other apps start to compete, don't limit your users on basic content, that's not what Twitter is about. The point of paying for Twitter blue is to allow us to have extra features, not to take away a common free feature and put a paywall behind it."

"We see this as a sales funnel to get more users verified and into [Twitter] Blue, instead of fighting spam," added AustinCapital, a popular citizen journalist account.

Some users also felt that restricting private messages for unverified accounts might just result in verified accounts being able to spam in private messages anyway.

Others believe that Twitter's move is more about pushing people to pay to verify to cover its huge operating costs than fighting spam.

This follows a series of sweeping changes to the platform by Elon Musk.

On July 1, Twitter imposed a strict rate limit on the number of posts a user could see each day to curb data scraping and "system manipulation."

Then, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta launched a Twitter alternative called Threads, which initially attracted a lot of hype and a huge user base, but eventually introduced its own rate limiting on July 18.

In April, Twitter also rolled out content monetization settings on its platform, enabling creators to monetize various forms of posts globally.

Collect this article as an NFT to preserve this moment in history and show your support for independent journalism in the cryptocurrency space.