Alex Omenye
Elon Musk’s decision to temporarily limit the number of messages that Twitter users may view on the social media platform could jeopardize the company’s efforts to draw in advertisers under its new CEO Linda Yaccarino, marketing industry experts warned.
In an effort to prevent “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Musk revealed on Saturday that Twitter would restrict the number of tweets that different accounts can read each day.
Ad industry professionals claimed that Yaccarino, the former head of advertising for NBCUniversal who began serving as Twitter’s CEO last month, now faces a challenge as a result of the decision.
According to a story published by the Financial Times this week, Yaccarino has made an effort to mend fences with advertisers who have abandoned the site since Musk purchased it last year.
According to Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, the restrictions are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers who are already uneasy about the “chaos” Musk has introduced to the site.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed brd on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
Yaccarino is Musk’s “last best hope” to save advertising income and the company’s worth, according to Lou Paskalis, the founder of the advertising agency AJL Advisory and a former marketing executive at Bank of America.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he said.
Unverified accounts were initially restricted to 300 new unverified accounts and 600 posts per day under the new quota. According to Musk, verified accounts could view 6,000 posts each day on the website.
A few hours later, he claimed that the limit had been increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for brand-new unverified users.
The restriction was put in place soon after Twitter started forcing users to sign into an account to access tweets, a move Musk described as a “temporary emergency measure” to stop data scraping.
Musk had previously indicated his displeasure with artificial intelligence companies using Twitter’s data to train their huge language models, such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT.
