Despite struggling to attract advertisers to the new Twitter, Elon Musk appears unruffled. The exit of the head of safety, Ella Irwin and the appointment of the new chief executive, Linda Yaccacino, with an impressive resume, may have only compounded the crisis at the micro-blogging platform. Musk, believed to be the richest man in the world, has had his hands in too many pies and the Twitter pie appears to be one bitter pill to swallow.
Early last week, Musk limited daily tweets for subscribers and shortly after began to mock the same subscribers, a situation seen by many as “crude and unedifying”. But does Musk really care, especially as he wears the toga of a “ruthless capitalist”?
In early May, he named Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBC Universal, the new chief executive officer (CEO) of the microblogging platform. While explaining that Yaccarino would oversee business operations at the site, which has been struggling to make money, he added that she would start in six weeks. However, she resumed earlier than announced. Musk, however, remained involved as the executive chairman and chief technology officer.
He said, “Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.” The billionaire wrote on Twitter, confirming the decision a day after he had stoked speculation by writing that he had found a new boss without revealing the name. Until her appointment, Yaccarino was the head of advertising at NBC Universal. At NBC Universal, Yaccarino oversaw roughly 2,000 people and was involved with the launch of its streaming service. She joined the company in 2011, after 15 years at Turner Entertainment and has been credited with bringing the network’s ad sales operation into the digital future.
Her departure appeared to take NBC Universal by surprise. Yaccarino was believed to have brought to Twitter a rich background in advertising, which the social media company relies on to make money and which has dropped sharply since Musk’s takeover. But that is where the excitement stops as Musk navigates unknown waters to carve a new image for Twitter.
When he limited the daily number of tweets users can read on the microblogging site last week, Musk announced this as thousands of Twitter users reported problems attempting to access the social media site. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, adding that the limitation was applied to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation. According to his tweets: “To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts/day. Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day. New unverified accounts to 300/day.”
Worried users who tried to access or post content on Twitter’s website or mobile app were met with a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message over the weekend.
In February, users were unable to post on the site for about 90 minutes after receiving a message that read: “You have reached the daily limit for sending Tweets.” In March, users were temporarily unable to click on links or load images.
Other outages coincided with reports of a data centre closure and massive layoffs at Twitter, which Musk, who bought the social media platform in 2022 for $44 billion, claimed were necessary for the financial health of the company. Strangely, Musk joked about the microblogging site’s temporary daily reading limits after users vented their fury over the site’s new limitations. “Oh, the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” the billionaire tweeted on Sunday. He had earlier said Twitter applied the limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Musk said verified Twitter users were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, which was later increased to 8,000, then 10,000. Meanwhile, unverified accounts, those without a blue tick, were initially limited to reading 600 posts a day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300 posts a day. The figures were later increased to 800 and 400, respectively and, then, again to 1,000 and 500.
“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” Musk further joked. In another post, Musk said, “Rate-limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
The announcement led to “RIP Twitter” and “#Twitterdown” trending on the social media site. The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX has not said how long the temporary limits will last.
People started reporting problems shortly after noon on Sunday, according to the problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector. By 6 p.m., the website had received thousands of reports.
Co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense.” He added, “It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will”.
This comes after people trying to access Twitter on Friday were told they would have to be logged into an account to view tweets, in what Musk called a “temporary emergency measure”.
The February outage meant many users were not able to tweet, follow accounts, or access their direct messages as the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.
The billionaire completed a $44 billion (£35 billion) takeover of the social media site in October 2022 and, in April, he introduced a payment system for “blue ticks,” or verified accounts. Subscribers are able to post longer tweets and can also make changes to published tweets, see about half as many adverts, and use non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures. High-profile figures and celebrities have said the move leaves the platform open to impostors and disinformation, while Twitter has said the service “elevates quality conversations”.
Since the entrepreneur’s acquisition, Twitter has cut costs dramatically and laid off thousands of employees, including many who had worked on efforts to prevent harmful and illegal content, protect election integrity and surface accurate information on the site.
Starting from April 1, when it wound down its legacy verification process, only accounts actively subscribed to ‘Twitter Blue’ became eligible to receive the blue checkmark. The Twitter team created eligibility criteria on when the checkmark is given to ensure it continues to maintain the integrity of the platform. Henceforth, accounts must meet the following criteria to receive or retain the blue checkmark: accounts must have a display name and profile photo, be active in the past 30 days to subscribe to ‘Twitter Blue’, be older than 30 days upon subscription, have a confirmed phone number, be non-deceptive and have no recent changes to the profile photo, display name, or username (@handle). Such accounts must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive and no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spam, among others.
