Over the weekend, Elon Musk surprisingly announced a temporary cap on the number of posts Twitter users can read, triggering mass attempts by users to move to other platforms, especially Truth Social – which has similar functions to Twitter.
The capping follows the implementation of a new requirement for users to log into their Twitter accounts to view tweets, which Elon Musk referred to as a “temporary emergency measure” to combat data scraping.
Like several other platforms, including Reddit and major media organizations, Musk had previously expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies, such as OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, for utilizing Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
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Musk sees capping tweets as an effective way to stop AI companies, an idea Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, agrees with. Yang noted that the tweet limits seemed to effectively prevent third parties, including search engines, from scraping Twitter data as easily as before.
But apart from forcing users to jump from Twitter to other platforms, Musk’s decision presents a situation that will likely exacerbate the current poor relationship between Twitter and advertisers.
According to marketing industry professionals who spoke to Reuters, Musk’s decision could also undermine efforts by the company’s new Chief Executive and former advertising chief at NBCUniversal, Linda Yaccarino, to make peace with advertisers.
Musk said on Saturday that he decided to limit how many tweets Twitter users can see per day to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
The decision, which forced many users out of Twitter during the weekend, ignited heavy criticism, with many labeling it ‘Musk’s latest attempt to destroy Twitter.’ The company’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey shared a plain field picture suggesting to Twitter users that it’s time to break their addiction and go outside and play.
— jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
The inability of users to see tweets beyond what was stipulated by Musk means that Twitter’s ability to serve ads has been impacted.
Users posted screenshots as proof that they were unable to view any tweets, including those from corporate advertisers, after reaching the limit.
According to industry experts quoted by Reuters, this development poses a challenge for Yaccarino, who has been focused on rebuilding relationships with advertisers who left Twitter following its acquisition by Musk last year.
Reuters quoted Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, saying on Sunday that the tweet limits have had a significantly negative impact on both users and advertisers, who are already grappling with the disruption Musk has brought to the platform.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing executive at Bank of America, said Yaccarino, the newly appointed CEO of Twitter, represents Musk’s final and most promising opportunity to revive ad revenue and restore the company’s value.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he said.
Musk initially limited the number of tweets users can see to 600 per day for unverified accounts, 300 for new unverified accounts and 6,000 for verified accounts. It was later reviewed upward to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, who also spoke to Reuters said the decision to cap how much users can view could be “catastrophic” for the platform’s ad business.
“This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” she said.