Elon Musk’s paywall may hurt Twitter revenue and usage, say experts

Twitter Blue subscribers, or verified users, can now read a maximum of 6,000 tweets per day while people who have not paid for Twitter Blue, or unverified users, are limited to reading 600 tweets per day. New unverified accounts will be limited to reading 300 tweets per day, Twitter executive chair Elon Musk said on Saturday. He said the idea is to prevent “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.

Kazim Rizvi, founding director of public policy think tank The Dialogue, said the stark difference between the threshold of posts for verified accounts and old/new unverified accounts seems to be aimed at pushing individuals towards purchasing the blue tick.

Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer, said Twitter is “fast losing its utility” with its “constant experimentation”.

“There’s no better advertisement for other federated services than a fumbling Twitter,” she said. “Musk needs a thoughtful strategy and not keep confusing users and everyone else. Rarely have we seen that someone wishes to reduce the usage of their own product.”

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Salman Warris, head of TMT at TechLegis, is optimistic about the move, and said, “Even though it is causing short-term inconvenience, hopefully, it could turn out to be positive in the long run, as it will ultimately lead to reduction in fake accounts and bots. Probably the initiative is part of the overall effort by Twitter to vein out fake accounts, which if true, is commendable.”Rizvi, however, said restricting the number of posts also paves the way for filter bubbles, causing echo chambers and passive censorship. “System manipulation could increase, where individuals might produce/post content that aligns with the dominant narratives in order to ensure their posts are read,” he said.

“The information filter bubble could also block counter-arguments from reaching us, which could be genuine or fact-checked information,” Rizvi explained.

Musk, in a second tweet, had said the reading limits will soon be increasing to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified users. In a third tweet, he said the reading limit will be 10,000 tweets per day for verified users, 1,000 for unverified users, and 500 for new unverified users.

While data scraping has both positive and negative implications, restricting the number of post feeds could be disproportionate.

For instance, a lot of researchers and academicians scrape data from Twitter to conduct research at the aggregate level.

Besides, the public and private sectors also try to scrape data from Twitter to see inferences of grievances raised by individuals via Twitter to create a feedback loop.

On the other hand, limiting data scrapping/number of posts could also positively reduce user profiling and lateral surveillance measures, Rizvi said.

Several users on Saturday reported seeing error messages that said “rate limit exceeded” or “cannot retrieve tweets” on the platform.

Twitter also no longer lets users access tweets, user profiles, or comments unless they are signed into an account.