Threads starts limiting how many posts people can see as it is hit by spam attacks

Announcement prompts mockery from Elon Musk, who introduced similar limits on Twitter

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Threads says it has been forced to limit how many posts people can see, amid an increase in “spam attacks”.

The announcement drew mockery from Elon Musk, who had been widely criticised for introducing such “rate limits” on his own site, Twitter.

Adam Mosseri, who serves as the head of Instagram and therefore Threads at Meta, said in a post on the site that it was being hit by more spam attacks and that it would have to take a range of responses as a result.

“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),” he wrote. “If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.”

The change means that users who use Threads the most might run into limits on how many posts they can see and whether they can view the app. He did not give any indication of where the rate limit would be set or how many people mighttbe expected to run into problems.

Threads users have complained about a significant increase in the amount of spam on the site, including in the replies to Mr Mosseri’s post.

Mr Mosseri has made a number of announcements about the future of Threads on the site. The company – which appears to have been surprised by the success of its own app – has been looking both to add new and widely requested features as well as deal with any technical problems caused by the success of the app.

The change drew mockery from Elon Musk, who announced days before the launch of Threads that Twitter would start rate limiting, in what he said was an attempt to stop AI companies scraping Twitter for data to train its models. That led to major problems for Twitter users, who were unable to see posts and more, and those technical issues have been pointed to as one of the reasons that so many users were eager to sign up to Threads in the first place.

Mr Musk laughed and posted “copycat” in response to a screenshot of Mr Mosseri’s post.

Mr Musk introduced his own rate limits earlier this month. But he announced the numbers of posts that users would be able to see – and did not invite feedback from those who might be swept up in the change.