BY BOY FIDEL LEON
Thousands of Ugandans are flocking to TruthSocial, after Twitter’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, introduced a new (temporary) policy limiting the number of tweets users can view.
TruthSocial, which launched in beta form on February 21, 2022, by Trump Media & Technology Group is a social media platform that has been positioned as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter, which banned former U.S. President Donald Trump from its platform in January 2021.
Despite criticism for its lack of features and association with Trump, the platform has become a popular destination for those seeking an alternative to Twitter’s new policy.
Twitter’s position is being threatened by TruthSocial because of their new policy of limiting how many tweets its users can read as the Elon Musk-owned service experiences an extended outage that has made it difficult for users to follow new posts.
In a tweet, Musk outlined the revised usage limits. Verified account holders can view up to 6,000 tweets per day, while unverified users are limited to 600 tweets. Newly registered, unverified users are subject to even stricter restrictions, with a daily allowance of only 300 tweets. (Musk has since increased the limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500.)
Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is doing this in a bid to combat “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.”
In a tweet, Musk said that the new limits will be in place for all users, regardless of whether they have verified their accounts or not.
“We are currently experiencing an extreme level of data scraping,” Musk said. “This is negatively impacting our ability to serve our users.”
Musk’s announcement comes after Twitter users reported on Saturday that they were unable to see new tweets in their feeds.Twitter users were instead greeted with an error message that said “rate limit exceeded.”
Whether TruthSocial will catch on and surpass Twitter in Uganda is questionable, but as people send in truths instead of tweets, the odds are against Elon.
