Last week, Elon Musk surprised users with the announcement of “temporary” limits on the number of tweets that could be read on Twitter. Also, unregistered users could not view the tweets. While some argued the company was simply trying to cut costs, Twitter posted a blog post to further explain the reason behind this sudden and highly unpopular move.
Twitter motivates tweet reading limits
The company wrote: “In order to ensure the authenticity of our users, we must take extreme measures to eliminate spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we’ve temporarily limited its use so we can find and eliminate bots and other malicious individuals who are harming the platform.”
Twitter claimed that a notice to users with regard to speed limits, it would have “allowed the bad guys to change their behavior to evade detection”. The company also reassured advertisers that Twitter’s current limits pertain only a small percentage of people and that the effects on advertising were “minimal”.
It’s not yet clear when Twitter will lift these speed limits, but the company says it’s working to stop bot accounts and other malicious individuals from mining people’s public data from Twitter to create artificial intelligence models. The platform also wants to stop bots from manipulating people and conversations.
“We will update users once the work is completed,” Twitter said. Meanwhile, though, the tweets they don’t appear in Google searches because the Mountain View AI can’t display them. Something that reduces the visibility of content, displeasing users and advertisers. So Twitter will have to speed things up, to avoid discontent.