Last weekend, Twitter’s Elon Musk went on a confusing tweeting spree in which he announced measures to combat so-called ‘scrapers’, i.e., companies that mine large amounts of data from the social media platform for their own purposes.
Under Twitter’s new rules, users would only be able to read a limited number of tweets per day: verified accounts would get 6,000, while new and existing non-paying users would get 300 and 600 respectively.
The ability for people who haven’t registered to peruse the social media platform is also coming to an end.
According to Reuters, Musk had earlier expressed his displeasure with artificial intelligence companies such as ChatGPT-owners OpenAI, which he believed were using Twitter data to train their language models to generate automated texts.
Musk, however, did not explicitly refer to these companies as being the cause of Twitter’s intervention.
According to Musk, these limitations are “temporary,” as they are meant to address “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to inquiries about how long the restrictions might last.
Less than two hours after his initial tweet, which stirred considerable controversy, Musk quote-tweeted his original announcement but added that those numbers would be bumped up to 8,000 for verified accounts, while new and existing non-paying users would be granted 400 and 800.
Again mere hours later, Musk tweeted the cap was raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
Before Musk unveiled his new policy, thousands of Twitter users reported being unable to use the platform properly. In several countries, #TwitterDown was the trending hashtag.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning.
In the meantime, ad experts have spoken out about Musk’s move, which they believe could potentially undermine efforts by the company’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers.
The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, told Reuters on Sunday.
“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 added.
Lou Paskalis, founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, said Yaccarino is Musk’s “last best hope” to salvage ad revenue and 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.
