Analysis
Over the weekend, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced sweeping controversial changes to Twitter, including a temporary tweet limit on how many posts people can read daily. He also announced that Twitter will prevent users not logged into an account from viewing tweets.
Musk attributed the temporary changes to an effort “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” However, many creators are upset about this new policy, saying Twitter doesn’t care about their livelihoods and might be taking its last dying breath.
According to Musk’s post, verified users on Twitter (aka, those paying for Twitter Blue or with over 1 million followers) will temporarily only be able to read 6,000 posts each day, while unverified users will only be able to see 600 posts each day and completely new accounts will only be able to see 300 posts.
On Saturday, thousands of users reported issues viewing tweets on the platform. In addition, TweetDeck, a Twitter-owned interface many creators use to schedule posts and upload to multiple accounts simultaneously, is also suffering. Many users reported the interface appears empty, with its various analytics failing to load.
In typical Musk fashion, he left creators with a lot more questions than answers. What’s going on with TweetDeck? Does just scrolling through your feed count as “reading” posts, or do you need to interact with a tweet for it to count as a view? When will these temporary changes be over? What about the future of advertising on the platform?
And most importantly, why on Earth would Musk choose to limit engagement on his own platform?
