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Twitter to impose daily limits on DMs for unverified accounts, citing an effort to ‘reduce spam’

July 22, 2023No Comments


More controversial changes are coming to Twitter, with the social media platform set to introduce daily direct message (DM) limits for unverified users.

In a July 21 tweet, Twitter support stated that the platform will be "implementing some changes soon in our effort to reduce spam in direct messages."

“Unverified accounts will have daily limits on the number of DMs they can send,” he stated, as he urged users to sign up for his Twitter Blue subscription service.

It has not been specified what the daily limits will be at this stage, however there has been a relatively negative reaction in comments, both verified and unverified expressing their opinions on the fly.

the top comment by user @FGRAdam has over 1000 likes at time of writing, offering a skeptical view of the upcoming change:

“Changes like this are the reason why other apps will start to compete, don't limit your users on basic things, this is not what Twitter is about. The point of paying for Twitter blue is that we have additional features so we don't take away a common free feature and put a paywall behind it.”

“In our opinion, this is a sales funnel to get more verified users and in [Twitter] Blue, not to combat spam”, aggregate the popular citizen journalist account @AustimCapital.

Several users also argued that limiting DMs to unverified accounts would likely only result in verified accounts being able to spam DMs anyway.

While others suggested the move is more about Twitter pressuring people to pay for verification to cover its high operating costs, rather than fighting spam.

The next move follows a series of sweeping platform changes that were introduced under the ownership of Elon Musk.

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On July 1, Twitter imposed a significant rate limit on the number of posts users could see on a daily basis, in an attempt to curb data scraping and "system tampering."

Subsequently, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta launched a Twitter alternative called instagram threads, which generated a lot of initial hype and a huge user base just to go and enter your own rate limits the July 18.

In April, Twitter also launched content monetization settings on their platform, allowing creators to monetize all forms of posts globally.

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