The new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, came out this Tuesday to support the company’s decision to limit the daily viewing of tweets. “When you have a mission like Twitter’s, you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform,” he said on his profile on the social network.
It’s Yaccarino’s first public comment on limits announced Saturday by company owner Elon Musk. Since then, users have a daily cap of tweets that they can view, which varies depending on whether they are Twitter Blue subscribers or new to the social network.
Yaccarino also shared a statement of the company in which he assures that, despite the controversy, it is not a big deal. On the one hand, he argues that restrictions affect a small percentage of people who use the platform. And on the other, that the effect on its advertising clients “has been minimal.”
The statement explains that they took “extreme measures” to ensure “the authenticity of our user base”. In other words, according to the company, with the maximum number of views the aim is to eliminate spam and bots. The company also references “other bad actors that are hurting the platform.”
Twitter explains why the surprise announcement of the limit of tweets
Musk, who bought Twitter last year, had explained that the decision to limit content viewing was made to stop “extreme levels of data scraping». The tycoon was referring to the extraction of data from the social network that is eventually used to train language models similar to ChatGPT. “It’s quite irritating to have to bring a large number of servers online” just to favor “some start-ups” of artificial intelligence, commented on the weekend.
The new communiqué once again highlights the explanation of the scraping as the motive behind the time limit of tweets. It also adds that the company did not make any prior notice before taking the measure. to prevent “bad actors” from altering “their behavior to evade detection.”
Twitter thanked its users for their patience and said they were committed to making the social network “a better place for everyone.” “Sometimes, even for a brief moment, you have to slow down to speed up,” the text states.
Yaccarino’s first month
Although the company insists that it is a temporary cleanup measure, some former Twitter workers have claimed that the change has more to do with the financial problems facing the company.
Since Musk took over, the social network has cut spending across all lines. For example, it has cut almost 80% of its workforce. And, in addition, it has faced inconveniences with the payment of invoices with some of its most important partners. Among them, Google and Amazon, with whom it has contracts to complement its server infrastructure.
The controversy over the limit of tweets It is the first big fire during the management of Yaccarino, who took over as CEO less than a month ago. The second is coming soon and it promises to be crazy: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that it will launch Threads this week, its own version of Twitter.