Linda Yaccarino has broken her silence on the worst crisis that Twitter’s social media platform had ever experienced. She joined Twitter in early June. But users still have a lot of questions about what’s going on.
Elon Musk of Twitter, announced July 1st that users were limited to 600 tweets each day. Many people had reached this limit in less than one 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. Oddly, the CEO didn’t tweet about the crisis until Tuesday afternoon. Her last tweets were on June 30, and she only tweeted an explanation on Tuesday.
“When you have a mission like Twitter—you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform. It is important and ongoing. 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. Some users still hit the limit of tweets read.
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. What ever the cause, the end result was always the same. Fewer people were looking at tweets which would presumably result in lower advertising revenues.
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.”
Twitter has become increasingly unusable over the past few days. Bluesky, the Twitter rival created by Jack Dorsey and his co-founders, experienced a massive influx of users Saturday, forcing it to limit registrations. Bluesky, a Twitter competitor founded by Jack Dorsey, saw a huge influx of new users on Saturday that it had to temporarily limit sign-ups.
However, other competitors have clearly noticed the blood. Facebook parent Meta launched Threads in the last week. It looks a lot like Instagram mixed with Twitter. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the time will only tell if they can successfully steal Twitter users.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, set up an automated reply in March that responded to questions sent on Twitter. Musk is 52 years old.
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