Elon Musk tweeted that unverified users could read 1,000 tweets, and verified users 10,000 per day.
People began to share screengrabs of messages that they’d “exceeded” their daily allowance of tweets.
Elon Musk was doing something that seems unfathomable for a social media company – he was limiting user activity.
The move has baffled advertising executives.
However, this is part of a much longer game that Elon Musk is playing – a battle with AI companies.
Let’s first start off with how Twitter actually makes money. The vast majority of its revenue comes from advertising, just like Meta and Google.
When users go onto the platform, they’re served ads. The more time they spend on Twitter, the more ads they see. The equation is pretty simple. That’s the business.
However, Elon Musk has traditionally eschewed advertising. Tesla famously doesn’t do ads.
In 2019 he tweeted “I hate advertising”.
And yet he’s bought a company that is totally reliant on it.
So, Elon Musk is desperate to generate different revenue streams.
This is not just a business decision. He believes that advertisers hold too much power over social media companies when it comes to moderation.
Advertisers can, and have, pulled their money from Twitter.
Advertisers don’t want their ads placed next to racist or extremist content. And so Twitter’s main revenue stream also has an influence over how much “free speech” is allowed on the platform.
Mr. Musk told me in April that “most” of the advertisers had returned after initially pausing their ads from Twitter after his takeover.
However, Mr. Musk has another plan to turn Twitter into a profitable company.
He wants Twitter to make money out of the vast amount of data it holds.
Platforms like Twitter and Reddit hold a treasure trove of hundreds of billions of real human conversations – an incredible resource for AI companies.
Large language models (LLMs), can learn from these interactions, and work out how to respond to questions in more human-like ways.
But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be paid for the use of their data in this way.
In April, Reddit’s chief executive Steve Huffman told the New York Times that he was unhappy with what AI companies were doing.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” he said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
At around the same time, Elon Musk said that Microsoft was “ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads), and then selling our data to others”.
On Saturday it became clear how frustrated Mr Musk was getting.
“We were getting data pillaged,” he said.
“Almost every company doing AI, from start-ups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.
And so, by restricting usage, Elon Musk is hoping to prevent its data from being pulled into LLMs. He wants to negotiate with AI companies and get paid for the content that they take.
Source- BBC
