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Elon Musk's decision to temporarily limit the number of postings that Twitter users may read on the social media platform may jeopardise the company's efforts to recruit advertisers, according to marketing industry executives.
Musk stated on Saturday that Twitter will limit the number of tweets that certain accounts may read every day in order to avoid "extreme levels" of data harvesting and system manipulation.
Users responded with screenshots demonstrating that they were unable to access any tweets after reaching the limit, even tweets from corporate sponsors' sites.
Ad industry insiders say the decision presents a challenge for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising director who took over as Twitter's CEO last month.
According to the Financial Times, Yaccarino has attempted to mend connections with advertisers that abandoned the site when Musk purchased it last year.
According to Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, the constraints are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers who have already been unsettled by Musk's "chaos" on the site.
"The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino must overcome has grown even larger." And it cannot be overturned only on the basis of her industry credentials," he added.
Yaccarino is Musk's "last best hope" to save ad income and the company's worth, according to Lou Paskalis, founder of advertising firm AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America.
"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," he added.
Unverified accounts were originally limited to 600 posts per day under the new quota, with new unverified accounts limited to 300. Musk stated in a blog post that verified users may view 6,000 articles each day.
He then said that the limit has been lifted to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
A Twitter spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment or questions about how long the limits will be in effect on Sunday.
According to Jasmine Enberg, chief analyst at Insider Intelligence, limiting how much users can watch might be "catastrophic" for the platform's ad business.
"This isn't going to make it any easier to persuade advertisers to return." "Bringing back advertisers is already a difficult sell," she added.
The ban came shortly after Twitter began asking users to log in to access tweets, which Musk described as a "temporary emergency measure" to fight data scraping.
Musk had previously expressed his concern with artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for exploiting Twitter data to build big language models.
Platforms such as Reddit and major news media organisations have expressed concerns about AI businesses utilising their data to train AI models, while some have requested payments.
According to Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, the constraints appeared to be successful in preventing other parties, particularly search engines, from harvesting Twitter data as previously.
"It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and much less efficient," he says.