Meta’s Threads app is limiting the number of posts users can see per day in an effort to crack down on spam.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the change on Threads Monday night.
“Spam attacks have picked up, so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.”
While it’s not clear how an active user who has been unfairly targeted for his or her rate usage would appeal the limit, Mr. Mosseri implied a system would be in place.
Users complained to Mr. Mosseri about the state of Threads. A few weeks after launching, they contended the site was plagued with spam posts with ads for cryptocurrency and gambling.
The announcement drew mocking laughter from Twitter owner Elon Musk, who previously instituted rate limits on Twitter to combat similar issues. Mr. Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, used the announcement to once again call Threads a copycat of Twitter.
Earlier this month, in response to data scraping and system manipulation, Twitter gave paying users a maximum of 6,000 posts to view per day and free users 600.
Twitter and Threads are in a race to curb bots and spam accounts on their platforms. Meta may be in a slightly better position to eliminate bots and retain the faith of their users since Twitter has significantly gutted its engineering department and has yet to make a big dent in a long-standing bot issue.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.