Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the app seems like it can’t go 24 hours without scandals, scoops, twists, technical or organizational chart changes.
The last two news in chronological order, in a certain sense connected to each other, are the downtime that hit the social platform on Saturday 1 July. And, perhaps also as a result of this, Elon Musk’s decision that Twitter will set a limit on the posts that users can view each day.
Let’s start right from the news of the down to the app, in some way preparatory to the corporate decision.
Twitter down
On Saturday 1 July, Twitter experienced global problems and malfunctions.
Slowdowns and impossibility to access have been reported all over the world, including Italy. But, as they say, “patchy”. For some, no problem occurred (which, it seems, affected above all the desktop version of the social network).
But here is the point that interests us most. Many users have received the message “You have reached the limit”. Phrase that appears when you get to the daily sending of 2,400 tweets, or 500 direct messages. But in the case of the down on July 1st, the warning also appeared to those who had not reached that number of chirps.
Twitter and the post limit
The decision taken by Elon Musk on the evening of Saturday 1 June is always about the limit of Twitter posts.
And made public, as usual, via tweet. At 19.01 Musk he wrote:
“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.”
That is: “To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we have enforced the following temporary limits: verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, new accounts verified at 300 per day.”
Musk would later reassure that the limit for verified accounts (those with a blue check, who pay $8 a month) would soon rise to 8,000 posts, and that for new accounts to 400.
The protests (and the half step back)
Musk’s move to limit Twitter posts immediately raised a hornet’s nest.
Protests have arisen both from anonymous users and from VIPs. The question remains where is the time to read thousands of posts a day, but that’s another matter. Fact is that Musk soon retraced his steps, and the limits were raised on the morning of Sunday 2 June. Now the maximum has been set at 10,000 read posts for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified and 500 for new accounts.
The fear of data leakage
Behind Twitter’s decision to set a limit of daily posts to be read is the fear of data scraping, ie the extraction of a large amount of company data by competitors.
Musk had already expressed his fears in this regard. The accusation, never made explicit, goes above all to OpenAI. That he would have trained his artificial intelligence using (also) the data extrapolated from Twitter.
There is more?
There are those who think that this limit on reading posts imposed by Twitter is based on economic reasons. Musk would thus try to monetize as much as possible, with the risk, however, that this cut would discourage advertisers. It goes without saying that less visibility of tweets also means less visibility of ads.
Verso Twitter 2.0
The limit of Twitter posts falls just a few days after the declarations of the new CEO of the company, Linda Yaccarino.
Who seems to want to work in continuity with his predecessor Musk, as we told you in an article.
In a note to employees, Yaccarino spoke of “Twitter 2.0″. And he wrote to them: “Elon has transformed industries that needed change, such as space and electric vehicles. Now it is clear that the global market also needs change, to promote civilization through the free exchange of information and an open dialogue on what interests us most”.
Ma especially in the direct appeal to employees, actually a bit disturbing, it really seems that nothing has changed compared to Musk’s management: “You have to really believe – and work hard for that belief.”