Twitter owner Elon Musk has placed limits on the number of posts that users could read in a temporary move that targets “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” by other companies.

In tweets during the past few days, Musk detailed the change. “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” Musk tweeted Saturday.

Twitter users with verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day. Unverified account users were limited to reading 600 posts per day. New unverified accounts were limited to reading 300 per day. 

On Saturday, about two hours later, he increased the view limits to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified. Then Musk raised the tweet count to 10,000, followed by 1,000 and 500, respectively.

Musk has been vocal about his disapproval for organizations that scrape Twitter data and use tweets for research or to train AI programs. In the past, he has pointed to Microsoft as well as OpenAI — initially a non-profit, created by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The move is intended to discourage and prevent AI companies from scraping the site for data that Musk believes is used to help train models for free. 

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk tweeted Friday. “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and former Twitter owner, appeared to come to Musk’s defense. “Running Twitter is hard,” Dorsey tweeted. “I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. 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.”

Many comments came in, including one that said “bro just remove it, literally no one likes it.” Some thought Musk took the web backwards, with one tweeting: “Putting hard limits on reads is web 1.0 stuff.”

The keyword term “rate limit exceeded” trended on Twitter, mostly by people who appeared to be inconvenienced by the new policy. Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of malfunctions on several websites, showed users reported that Twitter problems rose on Saturday.

Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, fell 59% compared with a year earlier, The New York Times reported, based on an internal presentation.

Elon Musk has placed limits on the number of posts users could read in a temporary move that targets “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” by other companies. “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” Musk tweeted Saturday.