Elon Musk chimes in as Threads tightens rate limits to combat spam bot attacks
Threads / MetaThreads is planning on tightening rate limits due to spam bot attacks amid the app seeing a historic number of sign-ups in its first days on the market. Naturally, Twitter owner Elon Musk has chimed in.
When Meta announced its official competitor to Twitter, Threads, it saw the app makes waves across the internet as it broke records with 100 million users signing up to the app in its first week.
However, just days removed from its meteoric release, Threads is already facing the harsh realities that plague many social media apps, namely spam bots crowding out comment sections.
But now, Threads devs are taking action as they will be tightening the sites’ rate limits to combat spam bots.
“Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote in a Threads post. “Which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives).”
Every single social media platform has some form of rate limits, however, Mosseri’s post makes no mention of how restrictive the new rate limits will be on Threads, nor does he mention what the specific limitations are at this point in time.
Other social media platforms, namely Twitter, have instilled harsh rate limits of late to combat spam attacks. With the platform allowing new unverified accounts to view 400 tweets, unverified accounts 800, and verified Twitter Blue accounts 8,000.
However, the rate limits which Twitter introduced were only in place for a few days before being altered after much controversy. As for how long Threads’ rate limits will be around for, it is currently not known.
And it seems Elon Musk was reveling in Threads’ rate limit implementations as Musk replied to a tweet of the screenshotted post calling it a copycat.
Musk had previously threatened a lawsuit against Meta as they claimed that when Meta hired former Twitter employees, they still had access to Twitter’s trade secrets. However, a Meta Spokesperson, Andy Stone, said that there is no former Twitter employees on their engineering team.
