In line with Twitter, fee caps have been meant to assist thwart bots that solely affected just a few customers

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Recent usage restrictions on Twitter were put in place to “detect and eliminate bots and other malicious actors,” the company said on Tuesday, adding that only a “small percentage” of users are currently affected.

“To ensure the authenticity of our user base, we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform,” Twitter said in a blog post. “Any advance notice of these actions would have enabled the perpetrators to change their behavior to avoid detection.”

The company said the measures are aimed at preventing accounts from harvesting users’ public data to create artificial intelligence models and manipulating use of the platform.

Twitter owner Elon Musk announced the restrictions on Saturday, saying users are only allowed to read a certain number of posts per day due to “extreme data exploitation” and “system manipulation”.

Twitter billed the restrictions as temporary and they were tiered based on a user’s verification status on the platform. The update came as many Twitter users were encountering error messages while trying to access the platform.

“Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of users of the platform and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As for our customers, the impact on advertising has been minimal,” Twitter said Tuesday.