What is Elon Musk thinking?

Twitter's 400 million users were taken by surprise over the weekend when the the micro-blogging platform's owner, Elon Musk, curtailed usage of the forum without warning. Within hours, though, Musk backtracked, twice increasing those limits to curb user criticism.

Even with the updated limits, new unverified users could only view 500 tweets a day, apparently including unread tweets appearing in a Twitter feed (though USA Today reported that it remained, "unclear how the site was calculating what counted as a read tweet"). This left many users locked out with a “Rate limit exceeded” notice. Some reported getting the daylong ban after about two hours on the platform.

One accepted the forced “time out” with grace.

Others with a mix of humor and frustration.

Or just humor.

Making that last meme seem to ring eerily true, Musk actually boasted about hitting “all-time high” usage just one day before enacting his limits.

Do the opposite?

Twitter users post over half a billion tweets each day, with more than $4 billion in annual revenue generated by users viewing those tweets. That being the business model, data scientist and ex-Twitter employee Dr. Rumman Chowdhury expressed his shock at Musk's decision in an interview with the BBC.

For a platform that requires engagement, limiting posts seems to go in the opposite direction. It is a "very extreme and unprecedented tactic" which is "already failing", said Dr Chowdhury.

The Atlantic called the move, “the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule.”

Data scraping & system manipulation?

Musk's ability to run a social media company was questioned before his Saturday surprise.  

But now, tech savvy Musk followers have a major decision and his proffered reasoning by which to judge the platform's owner as Musk provided more details about his claimed need to combat “data scraping & system manipulation.”

Ehden Biber, a self-described “cybersecurity and privacy professional,” took Musk to task for these claims.

Biber followed up with a series of seven additional tweets, arguing that if this were truly about data scraping Musk would have left Apple and Android phone users out of his limit, since those phones allow for easy detection of data scraping bots. As for other users, Biber insists there's no chance Twitter's chief information security officer (CISO) does not know how to tackle that challenge without limiting usage. Biber concludes that Musk has issued his own company a self-inflicted wound, adapting the words of a popular song to express his frustration with the billionaire.

Shot through the heart and you're to blame Darling, you give #DevOps a bad name!

Free speech king or chief censor?

A report by the Washington Post revealed that, despite claims to the contrary, Musk was, in some ways, increasing Twitter's censorship policies.

So much for free-speech absolutism. Elon Musk proclaimed his devotion to expression above all else when he took over as Twitter CEO — but his tenure has seen the platform become, in many ways, more restrictive. A recent report on global government-ordered takedowns is the latest example.

Rest of World, a nonprofit publication that covers global technology, examined self-reported data on companies’ compliance with requests from authorities to take down users’ posts or hand over their data. It found that Twitter hasn’t refused a single demand since Mr. Musk took over. Those demands, meanwhile, have only mounted — surging from 550 in the six months before the site’s sale to more than 970 in the six months after. Twitter’s records show that it fully complied in 808 requests and partially complied in 154. What they don’t show is a single case in which it did not acquiesce. [Emphasis added].

CNN compared this total compliance with the company's pre-Musk days.

[P]rior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter frequently fought government takedown requests in court, including from India and Turkey, in addition to publicly releasing detailed information about such requests and how it handled them . . . before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it received more than 47,000 removal requests between July and December 2021, and complied with 51% of them. In many cases, when it did comply with a removal request because of a certain country’s laws, it removed the violating content only in that country, rather than globally.

More such censorship is described by Gizmodo in, “Elon Musk, King of Censorship: 10 Times the ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Silenced Twitter Users.”

Unclear decisions, unclear future

Business Insider noted that Twitter was already suffering a large decrease in ad revenue before the new limits led to what they called an “exodus” of users.

While Musk told the BBC in April that "almost all advertisers have come back," an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times showed that US ad sales that same month were down 59% compared to a year prior . . . [The new limits] prompted an exodus of users to similar platforms like Bluesky, backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, which had to pause new sign-ups due to a surge in demand.

Mark Zuckerberg may even attempt to capitalize on Musk's potential "missteps,” according to The Guardian. 

It appears that Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is preparing to step in to fill the gap Twitter is leaving, with reports the text-based app Threads or “Project 92” is about to be released imminently. Some speculated on the long term effects on the company.

Some are predicting the worst for the company.

Or a clear path?

Twitter is now out of the control of the politically motivated Jack Dorsey who regularly removed the accounts of political conservatives. Unable to rely on Twitter to continue to remove conservative content through their own algorithms, some suspect that censors in the government, NGOs and universities, who flag content and users for removal and file complaints with social media companies to accomplish just that, use data scraping to gather and analyze content, with the help of AI, on a level that is orders of magnitude higher that human capability.

Former State Department cybersecurity specialist Mike Benz believes that Musk is, knowingly or not, interfering with that censorship operation and, if successful, could save free speech, since, without unlimited access to content, the bots would not be able to analyze hundreds of millions of daily tweets.

He adds that Twitter is singled out for data mining because, uniquely, almost all users are themselves publicizing information (unlike YouTube) and do not require a friend status to access their posts (unlike many Facebook users).

Zach Vorhies, who joined James O'Keefe to blow the whistle on Google's algorithms that control access to information, believes Benz is spot-on, concluding, “Elon just threw a fat monkey wrench into the whole [censorship] machine.”