Twitter forces sign-up, limits reading access

Twitter forces sign-up, limits reading access

Twitter has just closed the door. The social network owned by Elon Musk now mandates registration to view any content and applies a daily limit of 600 posts for unverified accounts. Millions encounter the message "Rate Limit Exceeded" when trying to check a tweet. This measure aligns with Emmanuel Macron's statements, where he blamed social media for riots in France and announced actions to remove sensitive content and identify those inciting disorder. The timing has raised suspicions: is it a technical glitch or selective cyber-confinement?

What exactly peine with Twitter

The change is significant. Until now, anyone could read tweets without an account. Since this weekend, the platform requires login or registration to access any content. Elon Musk justified the decision by citing massive data extractions degrading service for normal users. "They were scraping us so hard that it was degrading the experience for normal users!" he wrote. The official excuse is scraping: automated programs collecting platform data to train AI. But the remedy proved worse than the disease. Not only can unregistered users see nothing; registered accounts also hit the wall. The limits—600 daily tweets for unverified users, 6,000 for blue subscribers, and 300 for new accounts—have turned the experience into a maze. Some argue it's temporary server overload; others point directly to control operations. According to Downdetector, failures began at 17:52, right after Macron attacked networks over the riots.

Coincidence with Macron and protests in France

The French president announced his government would take measures against platforms allegedly enabling riot organization. "We will identify those calling for disorder," he said. Hours later, Twitter started failing. The temporal sequence is, at minimum, striking. In France, police authorized drone surveillance of Paris and several municipalities from 18:00 until Monday, July 3, at 6:00, per prefectural decree number 2023-00772. Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti threatened parents of minors caught on streets at night with two years in prison and €30,000 fines. The full package—drones, curfews, fines, and now the closure of the main real-time information network—paints a scenario many interpret as a digital confinement trial. The scraping excuse and the riot excuse overlap too well.

The business behind the closure: identity and data

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. The deal never made sense. The platform doesn't generate enough profit to justify that price, and monetization ideas—subscriptions, paid verification, advertising—degrade it as a product. Closing unregistered access has an immediate economic reading: forcing registration to capture identity. No account means no data. No data means no business. Identity linked to opinions and interests is the real asset. The 600-tweet daily limit pushes users to pay €8 monthly for blue subscription to increase the quota to 6,000. It's a classic funnel: degrade free service until users pay. The problem, as some analyses note, is that most won't pay. Those who do will be few enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the network empties out.

Alternatives: Telegram, forums, and returning to the bar

Twitter's closure has revived interest in other platforms. Telegram, which doesn't require registration to read public channels, has become a refuge for trinc news without filters. Discussion forums, which never disappeared, are regaining traffic. And some ironically propose returning to playing cards at the bar. The underlying question is whether Twitter can survive as a real-time information network if only 600 tweets a day separate users from current events. The answer, for now, is no. A social network limiting reading to 600 daily posts is practically a dead network. And nobody will pay €8 to see 6,000.

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Musk's experiment has an uncomfortable precedent: during the pandemic, with millions of simultaneous messages on the same topic, Twitter didn't crash. Now, under the scraping pretext, it crashes just as France burns. The coincidence proves nothing. But nobody denies it either. What is clear is that the network promised to be the agora of free speech has ended up as a paywalled funnel with the door closed. And users, as always, look for the exit.