Jack Dorsey calls for ‘open internet’ as Musk imposes new reading limits on Twitter

Twitter co-founder also says ‘running Twitter is hard’ after widespread backlash

Jack Dorsey has said it is “critical to preserve the open internet” after Twitter owner Elon Musk announced controversial new “rate limits” for viewing tweets on the social media platform.

The Twitter co-founder and former chief said “running Twitter is hard” after widespread backlash against Mr Musk’s temporary limits on the number of tweets people can read on the microblogging site.

He, however, expressed hopes that the platform would build on “censorship-resistant open protocols” that would be “good for all, and critical to preserve the open internet”.

Thousands of Twitter users took to the platform to report problems with the site over the weekend, with complaints of inability in retrieving tweets, missing timelines and disappearing followers.

Reports of outages began flooding Down Detector, peaking on Sunday and extending to Monday.

The backlash started after Twitter declared on Saturday that verified accounts were being limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.

Mr Musk later said “rate limits” were increasing to “8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified”.

He reasoned that the limits were being imposed to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”.

Many users expressed their frustration with the new move as they got a notification that said, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again”.

Industry experts were also baffled at such a move by a social media company to put people off its platform, especially as Twitter has battled with retaining advertisers on the platform ever since Mr Musk took over last November.

“Never have I seen a social network try so hard to put people off using a platform and to completely curtail any potential future for its business,” Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and industry analyst told PA, adding that the move was “yet another crazy decision by Elon Musk”.

Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said the new move could be “catastrophic” for Twitter’s ad business, that has already reeled from dwindling revenues.

The company even roped in former NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to be its new chief to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the platform.

The latest “reading limits”, according to Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, “signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself”.

Mr Dorsey acknowledged that running Twitter was “hard”, adding that he trusted the team was “doing their best under the constraints they have”.

“It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar... which I’m guilty of... but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will,” he said.

It remains unclear how long the restrictions will last, as thousands continue to report about outages on the platform.

Twitter did not reply to requests for comment as it had earlier this year changed its policy for interacting with reporters.