On Saturday, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will be implementing restrictions on the number of tweets users can read per day. The purpose of this move is to deter excessive data scraping and manipulation of the platform’s systems. Users shared screenshots showing that once they reached the specified limit, they were unable to view any tweets, including those from corporate advertisers.
Elon Musk’s decision to impose limitations on tweet consumption presents a challenge for Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who recently joined the company and previously served as the advertising chief at NBCUniversal.
According to industry experts in the advertising field, this move by Musk complicates Yaccarino’s efforts to rebuild relationships with advertisers who had withdrawn from the platform after Musk acquired Twitter last year. The Financial Times recently reported on Yaccarino’s attempts to mend ties with advertisers.
“The limits are remarkably bad for users and advertisers who are already shaken by the chaos Musk has brought to the platform,” said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester. “The trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger, and it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone.”
Lou Paskalis, former marketing executive at Bank of America and founder of AJL Advisory, believes that Linda Yaccarino represents Elon Musk’s final and most promising opportunity to restore ad revenue and enhance the value of Twitter. He stated, “This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself.”
After implementing the new restrictions, Elon Musk initially stated that unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300. Verified accounts, on the other hand, had a daily limit of 6,000 posts, as declared by Musk on the platform. However, a few hours later, Musk raised the cap to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
Despite multiple requests for comment and inquiries about the duration of these restrictions, Twitter has not yet responded.
Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, expressed concern that implementing limitations on user viewing could have a catastrophic impact on the advertising business of the platform. She said, “This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It’s already a hard sell to bring advertisers back.”
Shortly after requiring users to log into their accounts to view tweets, Twitter implemented the cap on tweet consumption. Elon Musk referred to this account login requirement as a “temporary emergency measure” to combat data scraping.
Previously, Musk had expressed dissatisfaction with AI companies like OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their advanced language models. AI companies that use information from platforms like Reddit and news media outlets have faced objections, with some organizations seeking fees for the use of their data.
According to researcher Kai-Cheng Yang from Indiana University, the imposed limitations on Twitter seem to be successful in preventing third parties, including search engines, from easily scraping data. Yang added that while it might still be possible to scrape data, the methods required would be more intricate and less efficient.
(With inputs from Reuters)