This will surely be Elon and Co's favorite moment.

In the meantime, there are rising issues of data scraping while generative AI projects look for inputs to feed into their systems, and scammers seek out new vulnerabilities in apps. With this, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that they will impose tighter rate limits on Threads, their new Twitter-like app.
Meta is also putting rate limits in place on the new app to avoid having spam messages siege users, but it can be part and parcel of data scraping, which is the main reason why Twitter recently introduced its own rate limits, whose propriety has been severely criticized by the Twitter users as well as tech analysts.

Twitter's rate limits left many people locked out of the app, after reaching a certain amount of viewed tweets. Owner Elon Musk explained in the release that the move was necessary 'to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation', while pointing to generative AI projects as the key cause, which may have overwhelmed Twitter's servers.
Twitter has since increased its rate limits, so paying subscribers can view more content than non-Twitter Blue members. The whole situation had been framed as another example of Elon Musk's failure in managing the app and misunderstanding social media.

And now, Meta's doing the same, although there is a huge difference in both approaches-Instagram has limited fast actions like mass follows and comments whilst Twitter has capped how many tweets a user can see. Similar approach but different focus.
Even at this, Elon responded to the news in his usual restrained way:
It's hard to know how the new rate limits will affect the Threads users, or even how many people will be placed under the restrictions. But as Mosseri pointed out, for those who feel they have been unfairly rate limited, they can always turn to Instagram to address the issue.

It's not ideal, but it's seemingly a necessary step-as it may well be in Twitter's case-to halt third parties from controlling social media systems, and/or stealing data unauthorized.

And without an API, there is no alternative method of accessing Threads data other than through mass actions or scraping.

It is a new factor in the generative AI development age, though again, the rate limits introduced by Meta are different from those imposed by Twitter in a more AI-related approach.