July 3 (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s move to temporarily limit the number of posts Twitter users can see on the social media site has prompted the company’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, to attract advertisers. marketing industry experts said.
Musk announced on Saturday that Twitter will limit the number of tweets that various accounts can read per day to thwart “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
The user posted a screenshot in response, indicating that he could no longer see any tweets, including tweets from corporate advertiser pages, after the limit was reached.
Ad-industry veterans said the move would be a stumbling block for Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal who became Twitter’s chief executive last month.
Yaccarino is seeking to repair ties with advertisers who left the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.
Forrester research director Mike Purx said on Sunday that the restrictions are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already reeling from the “disruption” Musk has brought to the platform.
“The lack of advertiser trust that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse has grown, and her industry trust alone cannot reverse it,” he said.
Lou Pasqualis, founder of ad consultancy AJL Advisory and former head of marketing at Bank of America, said Yaccarino was “the last best hope” for reclaiming Musk’s ad revenue and company value. said.
“This move shows the market that he cannot empower her to save herself,” he said.
Under the new cap, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts were limited to 300 posts per day. A verified account allows him to view 6,000 posts a day, Musk said in a post on the site.
A few hours later, he said the limit had been raised to 10,000 posts per day for authenticated users, 1,000 posts per day for unauthenticated users, and 500 posts per day for new unauthenticated users. Stated.
A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment or inquiries about how long Sunday’s restrictions will last.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said putting limits on how much users can view could be “disastrous” for the platform’s advertising business.
“This will never make it easier to convince advertisers to come back. It’s already hard to get them back,” she said.
The restriction, which was introduced shortly after Twitter began requiring users to log into accounts on social media platforms to view tweets, was described by Musk as a “temporary emergency measures.”
Musk has previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter data to train language models at scale.
Platforms such as Reddit and major news outlets have complained, and some have charged, that AI companies are using their information to train AI models.
Caichen Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, said the restrictions appear to be effective in stopping third parties, including search engines, from collecting Twitter data as they used to. Stated.
“It may still be possible, but the method will be more sophisticated and much less efficient,” he said.
Reporting by Jody Godoy of New York, Sheila Dun of Dallas and Akash Sriram of Bengaluru.Editing: Burton Friarson and Nick Zieminski
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