Elon Musk’s temporary cap on Twitter post reading may affect Linda Yaccarino’s efforts to attract advertising.
Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit daily tweet readings to avoid “extreme levels” of data harvesting and system exploitation.
After hitting the limit, individuals posted images showing they couldn’t read any tweets, including corporate marketers’.
The move hampered Yaccarino, Twitter’s CEO and former NBCUniversal advertising director.
The Financial Times reported this week that Yaccarino has tried to reconnect with sponsors that fled the site after Musk bought it last year.
On Sunday, Forrester research director Mike Proulx called the limits “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already unnerved by Musk’s “chaos” on the site.
Linda Yaccarino lost advertiser trust. “Her industry credibility cannot reverse it,” he continued.
AJL Advisory founder and former Bank of America marketing director Lou Paskalis termed Yaccarino Musk’s “last best hope” for ad revenue and company value.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he continued.
Unverified accounts were limited to 600 daily postings and 300 new accounts. Musk said on the site that authenticated accounts can read 6,000 daily postings.
Hours later, he announced that verified users could post 10,000 per day, unconfirmed 1,000, and new unverified 500.
Twitter did not address Sunday’s briefness. Insider Intelligence’s lead analyst, Jasmine Enberg, called capping user viewing “catastrophic” for the platform’s ad business.
Adverts won’t return. “Bringing advertisers back is already hard,” she said.
Musk dubbed Twitter’s tweet login a “temporary emergency measure” to prevent data scraping.
Musk previously questioned OpenAI’s use of Twitter data to train huge language models.
Reddit and big media have criticized AI companies for using their data to construct AI models for fees.
Indiana University Bloomington researcher Kai-Cheng Yang said the limits prevented third parties, notably search engines, from obtaining Twitter data.
“It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and less efficient,” he said.