Twitter’s new reading limits are “absolutely fundamentally against what Twitter once was”, according to Jess Kelly.

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Saturday said the company was limiting the number of tweet users can read each day in a bid to tackle "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation.

After users reacted furiously to the new rules, the company increased the limits under three user-bands.

As of this morning, the tweet limits are:

• Verified users: 10,000 tweets
• Normal users: 1,000 tweets
• New account: 500 tweets

When users continued to argue against the changes, Musk joked: “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits”.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Newstalk Tech Correspondent Jess Kelly said Twitter is also introducing changes that mean it will no longer be able to share tweets with anyone who is not logged into the platform.

She said it is “very hard to understand the business case” for the changes.

“He is creating all these boundaries that are absolutely fundamentally against what Twitter once was and a lot of people are now saying it is yet another death knell against the platform,” she said.

“It’s also not good news for advertisers as well because the way the Twitter model works is that every third or fourth tweet is an ad.

“So, when you open the Twitter app now, if you refresh to try and get the latest tweet you may have used up your limit before you actually get to read any of the content.

“So again, having looked at this from every angle, I cannot see the business case for it.

“I think it is going to be detrimental for users – particularly on a day like yesterday when you had a lot of GAA going on and we know that so many people follow the matches live on Twitter. You just couldn’t do it.”

Jess Kelly

Jess said Musk has justified the changes as an attempt to prevent AI bots from scraping the entire platform for data.

“His rationale for this is he believes that Twitter is being data scraped essentially as a learning tool for Artificial Intelligence,” she said.

“So, things like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard – all of those different chatbots need material to learn from.

“That is how these things get smarter, it’s how their English get better.

“So the allegation is, sites like Twitter and Reddit are being fed into it so it understands how people speak, it understands quick turns of phrase and, you know, slagging and different tones and so on.”

Jess said the changes will be particularly frustrating for people who have paid for verified accounts or use the platform for work.