Elon Musk’s decision to temporarily limit the variety of posts Twitter users can read on the social network could undermine recent CEO Linda Yaccarino’s efforts to draw advertisers, marketers say.
Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter would limit the variety of tweets per day that different accounts can read to discourage “extreme levels” of information scraping and system manipulation.
In response, users submitted screenshots showing that that they had not seen any tweets after hitting the limit, including tweets on corporate advertiser sites.
Veterans of the ad industry said the move was a setback for Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s former head of promoting, who began last month as Twitter’s CEO.
Yaccarino has been attempting to mend relations with advertisers who pulled out of the positioning after Musk bought it last 12 months, the Financial Times reported last week.
The bounds are “extremely bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has delivered to the platform, Mike Proulx, director of research at Forrester, said Sunday.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino must reverse has turn into even greater. And you’ll be able to’t reverse that based solely on her credibility within the industry,” he said.
![Linda Yaccarino from Twitter](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000011004595.jpg?w=1024)
![Elon Musk](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013540949.jpg?w=1024)
Lou Paskalis, founding father of consulting firm AJL Advisory and former head of selling at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk’s “last best hope” to avoid wasting ad revenue and company value.
“This move signals to the market that it’s unable to bolster it to avoid wasting it from itself,” he said.
Under the brand new limit, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts per day, and recent unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified accounts were allowed to read 6,000 posts per day, Musk said in a post on the positioning.
A couple of hours later, he said the limit had been raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for brand new unverified users.
A Twitter spokesperson didn’t reply to requests for comment and inquiries about how long Sunday’s restrictions would last.
![Twitter logo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000011006904.jpg?w=1024)
Limiting how much users can see could be “disastrous” for the platform’s promoting industry, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“It definitely won’t make it any easier to persuade advertisers to return back. It’s already hard to bring advertisers back,” she said.
Olivia Wedderburn, director of creative agency TMW Unlimited, said she was advising her clients to “stop investing in Twitter immediately” because the platform rejects highly engaged users, which she said is the “only reason” to advertise on Twitter.
The limit got here shortly after Twitter began requiring users to log into their social media platform account to view tweets, in what Musk called a “temporary emergency measure” to combat data scraping.
Musk has previously expressed dissatisfaction with AI corporations like OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter data to coach their large language models.
Platforms including Reddit and major news outlets have complained that AI corporations are using their information to coach AI models, as some have demanded fees.
Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, said the restrictions look like effectively blocking third parties, including search engines like google, from scraping Twitter data as before.
“It could still be possible, however the methods can be far more sophisticated and far less efficient,” he said.