Understanding X/Twitter Limits
The posting, following, DM, character and API limits in one place, with what happens when you cross each of them.
Unannounced platform changes
X imposes limits on nearly everything available through the web app, mobile app, and API. Those numbers change without announcement. The figures below have held well longest, but take any particular count as ballpark. The value of the limit is less dependable than its shape. You will see this on the compose screen when a post button greys out, or in TweetSweep when you pause one of your queues. Stop looking for a one-day wipe from a number you heard about in the past month. Before starting a big job, double-check remaining capacity.
If a limit gets tighter, the product rarely elaborates. Another the same account may post freely before noon and if you could hit a wall after lunch. You have lower ceilings on new unverified accounts than old verified ones. TweetSweep does not manufacture additional elbowroom. It simply utilizes the allowance that the platform continues to provide. Instead of being stuck in a loop retrying your queue when it stops, just wait out the window. The error responses just cost you the same budget necessary to delete real data correctly. Keep the job pending and it will re-start when the next interval triggers
Daily posting and messaging
An average account may send about 2,400 posts per day. That amount is then broken into half-hour segments, meaning you can't just take your entire budget all at once. The compose button on x.com stops accepting new posts after hitting the interval cap until the window resets. Replies, quotes or originals all go into the same bucket. The TweeSweep deletions go under a different API budget, but a heavy posting day still saturates the same account. Consider 2,400 as more of a rough ceiling than hard and fast.
For most accounts, DMs sit below 500 daily. The pool is shared between group chats and one-to-one threads. So the new guidepost for how many new sends the message composer on the Messages tab will accept is once you hit it, until either a day later or until X determines what week that was (with a full calendar week giving way to rolling windows). A media in DMs is counted as a send similar to how text is If you are clearing an old account then do all the hard work for the visible-to-all timeline first, so a bulk direct message does not stingray with a deletion queue already using up your requested budget.
Follow rate and ratio rules
Follow is capped at about 400 accounts per day. The counter is on the profile page of whomever you attempt to follow. And if you do exceed it, the Follow button just stays in its loading state or gives an errant flash and nothing gets added. Unfollows have their own more gentle limit, however the one that deters most from further growth is the daily follow burst. TweetSweep does not perform follow or unfollow for you If both posts deletion and follows pruning are taking place, then spread those submissions over days (as one could starve the other).
After 5000 followed you will trigger ratio limit. That is, you cannot follow vastly more people than those who follow you back. The precise ratio is not displayed in any settings screen. You find out when Follow breaks down but you're under 400 for the day. The only surefire way is either to gain followers or unfollow until the gap gets small enough. This rule is not specific to TweetSweep. That last point is less intuitive; if you have a big follow list, it will not affect the throughput of deletes carried out. You still cannot wash this graph and the timeline in one afternoon.
Character and media limits
Individual posts are limited to 280 characters, even on a free account. Premium can go up to 25,000. X.com compose box pulls a count down as you type. Display names can go up to 50 characters, handles are capped off at 15 and the bio a further humbled 160. These profile fields are not in the post budget, but they are hard stops. It is not possible to save a 51 character name. TweetSweep never rewrites profile text. It just deletes the actual posts, these caps only count when you rebuild a cleaned account but not during a deletion job.
It is the hard media count on the composer — four images per post. A fifth image is refused. Depending on subscription tier, you can upload video that is a couple of minutes for free accounts or hours long as the top paid tier. Minute counts are strictly hikes, so open the video upload box and take a glance at its restrict in that time. Daily post count is not refunded for deleted media. TweetSweep removes the post record. Tweet disappearing = hosted files could still exist on X servers That is platform behavior, not a setting in the tool!
Timeline and read ceilings
Yes, that is what introduced daily read caps in 2023 and they are still relevant. New accounts that have not been verified hit lower ceilings than aged and verified ones. You hit them when you scroll Home, open profiles or load search. The app gives you a message stating that you need to wait because you've hit your limit. Those reads are with deletions, but it counts the same account. Your timeline as a whole gets synchronised up to X's 3,200-post limit through the official timeline endpoints. Indeed, anything prior to that window is opaque to an instrument that is simply paging through the live timeline.
This is the 3,200-post wall that explains why no cleanup element can reach back solely in the timeline to remove those posts buried down home of yours. Unlike with Twitter, on TweetSweep you choose instead to work from your archive download which is still long enough to address the oldest half of a long history, where most of the damage takes place. The archive is a zip you can request from Settings, Your account, Download an archive of your data Processing may take hours or can take a day. With access to that file, the tool is able to view tweets from a live timeline that will never make its way back. If there are more than only a few thousand posts in the account, your going to want to use that file.
Deletion request pacing
For cleanup tools the important API number is deletion count. X limits it to 50 requests every 15 minutes per user. There is a fixed hard cap that no tool can exceed. Deleting a post is as much expensive as reading one. Imagine trying to delete fifty every fifteen minutes, that's 4,800 a day at that perfect pace and no other API use. So a 40,000-post account is basically an entire multi-day project. The service that claims to deliver you results in a few minutes is telling you something the platform does allow. TweetSweep then queues deletions under that cap, pacing removals according to your preferences.
Leave the queue running overnight. The tool waits for each 15-minute window to pass and then dispatches the next 50. DO NOT Open second client EVERYTIME a job is Active. Those extra read operations take slots away from deletions. The count remaining on the TweetSweep job screen decreases by up to 50 after each batch. If it goes down less, something on the account utilized a chunk of the window. Complete first X activity, letting the paced job run until no archives are present.