Why did Twitter restrict its own tweets?

Twitter on Saturday began limiting the number of tweets users can view.

Elon Musk tweeted that unauthenticated users can read 1,000 tweets and authenticated users can read 10,000 tweets.

People started sharing screenshots of messages saying they “exceeded” their daily tweet allowance.

Elon Musk was doing something unbelievable for a social media company – he was limiting user activity.

The move has baffled ad executives.

But it’s part of a much longer game Elon Musk is playing: fighting AI companies.

Let’s start with how Twitter actually makes money. Most of the revenue comes from advertising, just like Meta and Google.

Ads are displayed when users visit the platform. The more time you spend on Twitter, the more ads you see. The equation is very simple. That’s business.

But Elon Musk has traditionally avoided advertising. It’s no secret that Tesla doesn’t advertise.

In 2019, he tweeted, “I hate ads.”

Nonetheless, he acquired a company that relied entirely on it.

That’s why Elon Musk is desperate to create another stream of income.

This is not just a business decision. He believes advertisers have too much power over social media companies when it comes to moderation.

Advertisers can and do withdraw money from Twitter.

Advertisers don’t want their ads to appear next to racist or extremist content. As such, Twitter’s primary source of revenue also influences how much “free speech” is allowed on the platform.

But Musk has other plans to turn Twitter into a profitable company.

He wants to monetize Twitter’s vast amount of data.

Platforms like Twitter and Reddit are home to hundreds of billions of real-world human conversations, an amazing resource for AI companies.

A Large Language Model (LLM) can learn from these interactions and figure out how to answer questions in a more human-like way.

But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be rewarded for using data in this way.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times in April that he was dissatisfied with the efforts of AI companies.

“Reddit’s data corpus is really valuable,” he said. “But you don’t have to give all of that value to the world’s biggest companies for free.”

On Saturday, it became clear how frustrated Mr. Musk was.

“We were being robbed of our data,” he said.

“From start-ups to some of the largest companies on the planet, almost every company working on AI was collecting massive amounts of data,” he said.

So Elon Musk wants to prevent his company’s data from being pulled into the LLM by restricting its use. He wants to negotiate with his AI company and get paid for the content they shoot.

But other factors may also be at play, going back to his other attempts to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising revenue.

Mr. Musk desperately wants people to pay for Twitter.

He’s been trying to get people closer to Twitter Blue for months. There’s the carrot of giving Twitter Blue members blue checkmarks and verifications, and the stick of removing verifications from non-paying users.

But TwitterBlue wasn’t what Elon Musk wanted. People are not paying en masse.

Perhaps he’s looking at other ways to get users to open their wallets. In the future, if I want unlimited Tweet access, may I have to pay a monthly fee?

Whatever Mr. Musk thinks, one thing is clear. Limiting Tweets is bad for advertisers.

Forrester’s research director Mike Prux told Reuters the restrictions were “significantly bad” for users and advertisers already reeling from Twitter’s “disruption.”

This is probably the most complicated part of Elon Musk’s restrictions. He recently hired Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s chief executive officer. She is a former advertising executive.

She reportedly has grand ideas on how Twitter can make more money, including full-screen video ads and convincing more celebrities to use the app. there is

The restrictions on her tweets made her job even more difficult. Less attention on your posts means advertisers are less interested in spending money.

Mark Zuckerberg will reportedly launch a Twitter clone called Threads sometime this summer. There is zero chance that your feed will be limited and limit the number of posts you can read. That’s not the meta way.

Elon Musk is an extraordinarily successful businessman who is genuinely frustrated when it comes to AI companies stealing his data. But what happened this weekend was another headache.