This weekend, Twitter announced a limit on reading tweets for users: 6,000 posts/day for verified accounts, 600 posts/day for unverified accounts, and 300 posts/day for new unverified accounts.
Moreover, no one can read a tweet if they’re not logged into the platform. This means that external Twitter links will no longer be working for many people.
As a response, Google removed many Twitter links from the Google search because they’re no longer working for people.
Musk claimed that Twitter took these measures out of necessity, because of artificial companies scraping “extreme levels” of data to train their AI models.
However, Yoel Roth, the former Head of Security of Twitter, said that Musk’s claim about data scraping “doesn’t pass the sniff test.” and that “Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine.“
Florent Lefebvre, a French social data analyst, also said that AI companies were unlikely to train their AI models from social media companies because that type of content “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes, and lacking in context.”
Instead, AI companies would rather focus on media articles and books because they are more reliable sources of information.
What Does This Mean for Twitter?
Twitter’s recent changes could spell catastrophe for the social media company. Both users and advertisers will think ten times before coming to Twitter.
The rationale is simple:
- Users will need to create an account to view any tweet, and this is already too much stress for many people
- The viewability of ads is directly limited by Twitter’s recent update
- Google has removed many of Twitter’s links from the Google search results, which further affects advertisers
Even though Musk has previously claimed that Twitter will need to step away from advertising revenue, this doesn’t seem like the correct way to do it.
What these changes do is alienate everyone, users and advertisers included. This could literally lead to bankruptcy for Twitter if not taken care of.
Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new CEO, hasn’t yet made public announcements about the recent changes. However, she had previously stated that the company would do everything it takes to win back advertisers.
Somehow, this looks like the exact opposite of that ideal. It seems Musk, despite stepping down from the position of CEO, is still holding the reins of the company.
