An expert on Twitter restrictions: – An unfortunate cocktail

The Norwegian professor is highly critical of Elon Musk as Twitter boss, but believes the platform’s “predicted death” is exaggerated.

Twitter owner Elon Musk shocked the internet when he came forward on Saturday New restrictions on the social platform.

Now the average Twitter user can only read 600 messages per day. Paying users can read it ten times as much.

It makes Twitter’s audience more limited and less accessible One can wonder where Musk’s fight for free speech will end when it creates hurdles like user payments, UiO professor Gunn Enli tells VG about the restrictions.

Musk says he’s doing this to temporarily limit large-scale data collection:

Many users react strongly to the new changes, and they believe that this is the beginning of the end for the platform.

Many believe that the beginning of the end began when Musk took over. His driving was unpredictable and created feedback throughout. The new changes are a break with the open and accessible Twitter that we know. It is something that worries many.

Enli has followed Twitter closely over several years as a researcher.

Twitter researchers are concerned about the changes that have occurred since he took office, especially due to the lack of evidence that he has the necessary qualifications to run such a company. He seems impulsive, self-absorbed, and cares little about the importance of creating a good atmosphere for expression and discussion. It’s an unfortunate cocktail, Inley says of Musk’s tenure as president on Twitter.

South Africa took over the popular platform in October last year.

– Why does Musk actually do this?

Argues that he wants to prevent the company from downloading large amounts of data from Twitter for research purposes or to train artificial intelligence. Perhaps he wants more control over Twitter’s data usage, and he wants to prevent third parties from getting data from the platform.

In addition, it has been put forward as an argument that people should be less on digital platforms. It’s a judgment about many parts, also parts of Silicon Valley. However it is unlikely that this is the main reason, and more likely it is an alternative argument

The UiO professor still believes the future of Twitter is uncertain, despite Musk’s latest “behaviour”.

She believes that Twitter alternatives are not having enough impact.

This joins the string of things Musk is doing that frustrate users, but I don’t think that’s the hook in the door yet. Although some users are fleeing to other platforms now, none of the competitors has enough critical mass to take over Twitter’s role as a global political group, says Enley, and points to several examples:

We must not forget that Twitter has been central to campaigns such as the Black Lives Matter movement, Me Too, and the Arab Spring. There are currently no social networks that have the same impact and ability to influence public opinion to the same extent.

The changes are also a shift in how Twitter wants to make money. Now they are shifting their focus from advertising revenue to user payments.

One of the success criteria for all social media is that it is free. Our time and attention has traditionally been most important to their business model.

It would be too risky to turn away from him. Perhaps this is a pilot balloon, and Musk and the company are closely following user feedback, to see if this is a viable way to secure the economy, she adds.

What are the consequences of this for freedom of expression?

Many people think that 600 tweets is enough. For us researchers, for example, it is important to be able to download a large amount of data from tweets. If the idea is for Twitter to be a global digital audience, it is fundamentally important that it be transparent and that user payments never stop coming in.