Changes to Twitter show walls are closing in on Elon Musk's 'digital town square': expert

When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he said he wanted to turn the blue bird app into a "digital town square," where different opinions could be debated. 

But one expert says Musk’s vision for the app is starting to crumble after the tech billionaire recently announced temporary limits to how many tweets users can view on a daily basis.

“This is extremely problematic given the fact that this is how people communicate, this is how they get their information,” Ritesh Kotak, a Toronto-based technology and cybersecurity expert, told CTV News Channel on Sunday.

“Instead of this being an open digital town square, it seems like the walls are actually closing in.”

WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE?

Musk announced the new limitations in a tweet Saturday, saying “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” were to blame for the temporary measure.

Originally, he said verified Twitter accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts a day and new unverified accounts would be limited to 300 posts a day.

Within a span of a few hours, Musk announced changes to those limits twice. He eventually gave verified accounts access to 10,000 tweets a day, unverified accounts access to 1,000 tweets a day, and new unverified accounts access to 500 tweets a day.

Kotak said he was shocked by the move.

“It is drastic. And it just came out of the blue,” he said.

Twitter also recently announced it would require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure."

It is unclear how long these measures will be in place for. 

The crackdown caused more than 7,500 people to report problems using the social media service at one point on Saturday, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. The #TwitterDown hashtag was also briefly trending in some parts of the world.

More than 60 users reported possible problems with Twitter as of Sunday afternoon, according to Downdetector, while 38 reports of possible problems with Tweetdeck were issued. By Monday afternoon, those figures dropped to 15 reports and four reports, respectively.

CTVNews.ca reached out to Twitter’s media division for comment, but received a smiling poop emoji in response. 

WHAT IS DATA SCRAPING?

Data scraping is the automated process of extracting large amounts of data from websites or online sources. 

Musk has been a vocal critic of organizations that scrape Twitter’s data for research or to train artificial intelligence programs including Microsoft and OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. He blasted such organizations on Friday.

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said in a tweet.

“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”

‘IT CAUSED ISSUES,’ EXPERT SAYS: HOW THE RECENT CHANGES IMPACT CANADIANS

The recent changes have received backlash from many users, some of which say they plan to flock to platforms such as Mastodon in an effort to boycott Twitter.

Limiting access to tweets restricts people’s access to critical information, Kotak said, pointing to extreme weather events as one scenario where people may rely on Twitter to find out what is happening in their area and how to respond effectively.

“It caused issues (on Saturday), especially given the fact that we did have some extreme weather across the country … and a lot of people who do get their news from Twitter were actually unable to see tweets because they exceeded their limit,” he said.

Although it was viewed as controversial, Canadians were also first informed about some of the details of the Nova Scotia mass shooting — the deadliest shooting in Canadian history — by the RCMP on Twitter back in April 2020.

Some users have also expressed displeasure over the fact that Musk has begun to monetize the platform by allowing those who pay a monthly fee to access more tweets as part of the company’s Twitter Blue subscription service.

Twitter Blue also gives users access to other features, such as a verified blue checkmark badge, as well as the ability to edit and write longer tweets. It was introduced in December 2022.

“stop making twitter pay to win,” one user said in a tweet on Saturday, which has raked up more than 52,000 likes and 2,017 retweets.

The tweet limits have sparked outrage among media professionals as well, since they heavily rely on social media platforms like Twitter to gather and disseminate information in such cases.

“I think Twitter was probably the most open platform where any individual (could) go to … just be able to read particular tweets, see what people are saying ... We didn’t have all these restrictions,” Kotak said.

“This has changed in the last little bit since Elon Musk took over.” 

With files from The Associated Press