Elon Musk on Saturday announced temporary tweet-viewing rate limits restricting how many posts un-verified Twitter users can see, blaming "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" for the limited functionality but the site's former head of trust and safety says that argument "doesn't pass the sniff test."

"Axar.az reports that to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits," Musk announced on Twitter in the first of a series of tweets about the decision. Throughout the day, Musk continued posting about the rate limits, increasing the number of posts users could view each time.

As of 10 a.m. Saturday, verified accounts for paid users were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, with existing unverified accounts limited to reading 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts only 300 per day. By 3 p.m., per Musk's tweets, those numbers increased to 10k, 1k, and 0.5k, respectively.