Twitter CEO Breaks Silence On Limiting Number Of Tweets Users Can Read

Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter who joined the company in early June, has finally broken her silence about the biggest crisis to hit the social media platform in recent memory. But users still have a lot of questions about what’s going on.

Twitter owner Elon Musk announced on July 1 that most users would be limited to reading just 600 tweets per day, a restriction that many people encountered in less than an hour. The Atlantic compared the move to Costco enacting a 12-item limit, but Musk insisted it was necessary to fight what he called “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.”

And while the number of tweets was revised upward over the past few days, it’s still a problem for people who use Twitter the most. Strangely, the new CEO was completely silent on social about the crisis, with her last tweets appearing on June 30 until she finally tweeted Tuesday afternoon with an explanation.

“When you have a mission like Twitter—you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform. This work is meaningful and on-going. Here’s more insight on our work to ensure the authenticity of our user base,” Yaccarino tweeted with an emoji of a finger pointing at a tweet from Twitter’s Business account.

That tweet leads to a statement from Twitter that still leaves plenty of questions about what’s really going on.

“To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection,” the statement from Twitter reads.

“At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways,” the statement continues.

Twitter went on to say that the new restrictions only “affect a small percentage of people using the platform,” though that doesn’t seem entirely true. Users still report hitting the tweet-reading limit with some frequency.

There have been a number of different ideas floated about what’s really going on with the new Twitter limits, with many people speculating it has something to do with the fact that Twitter has stopped paying many of its bills. In fact, Platformer reported on June 10 that there was a “mad dash” at Twitter to transfer data away from Google’s cloud hosting because Twitter’s contract with Google was set to expire on June 30.

Other tech experts pointed out an apparent Twitter bug that was constantly sending an infinite loop of new requests to the company’s servers, causing everything to crash. But whatever the real reason, the result was the same: Fewer eyeballs looking at fewer tweets, which presumably would result in less advertising revenue.

Twitter insists that whatever hit the company has taken over the past four days has been “minimal,” another assertion that was greeted with skepticism online.

“As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal. While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone,” the statement from Twitter reads. “At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up. We appreciate your patience.”

It seems a large number of people are sick of being patient with Twitter, however, since the company has generally become unusable in recent days. Bluesky, a Twitter competitor started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, saw such a huge influx of new users on Saturday it had to temporarily limit sign-ups. Bluesky has resumed operations normally, but is still in beta mode and requires an invitation to try out.

But other competitors clearly smell blood in the water. Facebook parent company Meta is rolling out a Twitter competitor called Threads this week, which looks like a cross between Instagram and Twitter. Only time will tell whether Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg can effectively steal users away from Twitter.

Questions sent to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon were greeted with a poop emoji, an automated response set up by Twitter owner Elon Musk back in March. Musk is a 52-year-old man.