Twitter just made history. And no, I’m not saying that sarcastically, far from it. Of course, I am not saying that he did it in the best way, or at least in the best way in the face of his own interests. And as is often the case on this hectic Elon “The Honest” Musk journey, we once again find ourselves with a half-explanation that is little better than the overdose of verbiage he punishes us with from time to time. Of course, not explaining is not good either.

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has been fumbling, despite who weighs him down, and while some of the decisions he made were the right ones, the common denominator of the vast majority is that they seem more like impulses than business decisions. Of course, we must not forget that this is probably one of the most overrated purchases (in terms of purchase value, you know what I mean) in the history of the Internet and the field of technology.

Musk he needs Twitter to make as much money as possible, because it depends on it to make such an investment profitable. This explains, for example, why Twitter Blue’s reach has grown rapidly since he took control, a logical step in contrast to the exasperating slowness with which previous managers acted in this regard. However, in its efforts to make the social network’s payment method more attractive, it has repeatedly undervalued free accounts, which generate a large portion of revenue from ad viewing. Not to mention the commercialization of verified.

To deal with extreme levels of data deletion and system tampering, we have applied the following temporary limits:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts up to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts at 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Well, now we find another movement that undoubtedly deserves to be in the top 3 most controversial. And it is as Musk himself said in a tweet, Twitter has put limits (basically temporary) on the number of messages we can see per day. And yes, of course the restrictions vary greatly depending on whether or not you’re a Blue user.

• Verified accounts: 6000 posts per day.
• “Old” unverified accounts: 600 posts per day.
• Recent unverified accounts: 300 posts per day.

And what reason does Musk give for this restriction? «Addressing extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation«. For some time now, Twitter has appeared intent on severely restricting large-scale access to data hosted on the social network, something that is used by all sorts of researchers for all sorts of purposes. We saw the first step in this direction with the removal of the free API and it continues now this new hack for free content access.

And why do I say that Twitter is acting against its own interests with this move? Currently, its main source of income is advertising, which is displayed to users when they check the publications of the social network. So if you set a limit on the maximum number of messages that can be viewed per day, de facto it is also based on the amount of publicity it will be able to serve. And I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but at least on the face of it, it seems like a shot in the foot… ugh, and a way to limit free access to information, which is exactly what you’d expect from a major defender of free speech (yes , now I’m being sarcastic).