Elon Musk’s Twitter limit to users’ posts may hamper advertiser appeal: Experts

On Saturday, Musk made an announcement stating that Twitter will implement a restriction on the number of tweets users can read per day. The purpose behind this move is to discourage excessive data scraping and manipulation of the platform’s systems. In response, users shared screenshots indicating that they were unable to view any tweets, including those from corporate advertisers, once they reached the specified limit.

The decision made by Elon Musk to impose limitations on tweet consumption poses a challenge for Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who joined the company last month and previously served as the advertising chief at NBCUniversal. 

According to Reuters, industry experts in the advertising field noted that this move hampers Yaccarino’s efforts to rebuild relationships with advertisers who had withdrawn from the platform following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter last year. The Financial Times reported on Yaccarino’s endeavors to mend ties with advertisers in a recent article.

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, said 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 said.

According to Lou Paskalis, the former marketing executive at Bank of America and founder of AJL Advisory, Linda Yaccarino represents Elon Musk’s final and most promising opportunity to restore ad revenue and enhance the value of Twitter.

“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he said.

Following the implementation of the new restrictions, Elon Musk stated that initially, 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 mentioned in a post by Musk on the platform.

However, a few hours later, Musk announced an update, raising 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, a spokesperson from 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.

“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.

Shortly after Twitter implemented a requirement for users to log into their accounts in order to view tweets, the cap on tweet consumption was introduced. Elon Musk referred to this account login requirement as a “temporary emergency measure” aimed at combating data scraping.

Previously, Musk had expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT, for utilizing Twitter’s data to train their advanced language models.

AI companies utilizing information from platforms like Reddit and prominent news media outlets to train their AI models have faced objections, with some organizations even seeking fees for the use of their data.

According to Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, the imposed limitations on Twitter seem to be successful in preventing third parties, including search engines, from scraping data as easily as they did in the past. 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)

Updated: 03 Jul 2023, 12:53 PM IST