Elon Musk announced last week the most drastic and controversial change since he took over Twitter. Limit the amount of content a user can view each day—and therefore limit their stay on the platform— It is the contradiction of any social network. The tycoon blamed third parties and clarified that it was a temporary measure. But the new measure is yet another sign of how serious the Twitter crisis is.
First, it set up a barrier so that only those with Twitter accounts could enter the site. Before, even people without profiles on the platform could see the tweets. Then came the daily limit for unverified accounts: 600 tweets per day, which in a few hours increased to 1,000. Musk was a little more considerate of those who pay for Twitter Blue: For this minority group, viewing is blocked after 10,000 tweets.
Musk blamed AI developers: He said he made the decision to stop “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation. It refers to the automated process of extracting public data from the Internet, which is then often used to train language models similar to ChatGPT. “It’s quite irritating to have to put a large number of servers online” just to favor “some start-ups,” added the mogul.
“RIP Twitter” trended immediately. And some insiders came out to argue with Musk. «It simply does not pass the smell test that, suddenly, the scraping created such dramatic performance issues,” fired Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and security at Twitter, who resigned within days of Musk’s arrival. Data mining was done before, Roth said, and “everything was fine.”
Unpaid invoices, the reason behind the Twitter crisis
Roth made the defense against Musk in a thread on Bluesky, another social network created by Jack Dorse, co-founder of Twitter. The new platform had record traffic over the weekend. So much so that he had to temporarily pause the registration of new users to avoid the collapse of the site. Executives at Mastodon, another competition, said they had registered more than 100,000 new accounts in the past few hours.
Every time Twitter fails, new options gain strength. And Twitter has been failing a lot lately: This year alone, it has suffered at least six general failures. Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist and former Twitter employee, also believes that artificial intelligence companies have little to do with this. “Frankly, I think I’m among the majority of people who believe it’s due to non-payment of their bills.… and he is trying to reduce his costs,” he told the BBC.
Twitter has been reporting unpaid invoices in recent months. Some, with several of their most important partners. The company has its own servers, but it also has longstanding contracts with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Platformer reported in June that Musk was refusing to pay for Google Cloud services, just when it was time to renew the contract.
The situation strained the relationship between the two tech giants. It got to the point where Google couldn’t even reach out to Musk to discuss the issue, he reported. Bloomberg. Payment resumed after the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, took over. The social network uses Google Cloud, above all, for data analysis and machine learning.
Something similar happened with Amazon. Jeff Bezos’s company had to threaten Twitter last March with the withholding of advertising payments, due to outstanding invoices related to the cloud computing services it provided, reported The Information.
Another bad news for advertisers
Musk had already complained before the scrapping. In May, she threatened to sue Microsoft—OpenAI partner, creator of ChatGPT—for using tweets to train its artificial intelligence tools. But there is also a billing issue in this conflict: the also leader of Tesla and SpaceX issued the warning after Microsoft reported that it would stop including Twitter as an alternative within its advertising platform.
90% of Twitter’s money inflow comes from the advertising business. Insider Intelligence forecast in April that the social network’s global ad revenue will fall this year to $2.98 billion. This would represent a decrease of 28%, compared to what was achieved in 2022. The New York Times He reported that Twitter ad sales already fell 59% in Aprilcompared to the same period last year.
The new limit of tweets comes to complicate the crisis of Twitter. Some Twitter sales employees were asking management for advice on what to say to customers when they realized that some ads would not show on the platform, Twitter said in a separate report. Times.
Limiting how much users can see could be “catastrophic” for the ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. “This certainly won’t make it any easier to convince advertisers to come back,” he told Reuters. These types of sudden measures, plus the proliferation of hate speech online, have scared off new investors.
Hopes for the financial recovery of the company are placed on the new CEO, who comes from being the Head of Advertising and Partnerships at NBC Universal. But, according to Lou Paskalis, founder of the advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, “this move signals to the market that he is not capable of empowering her to save him from himself.”