Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Slow your scroll. Elon Musk said over the weekend that Twitter will limit, at least temporarily, the number of posts you can read. He claims it's an effort to address extreme levels of data scraping, so verified accounts limited to 10,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 1000 per day. And this was revealed after thousands of users complained that they were unable or had trouble accessing the site. Many reported getting messages that they had exceeded their rate limit. So what is behind this latest turmoil for the company? CNN's senior media analyst Sarah Fischer joins us. She's also senior media reporter at Axios. And Sara, what gives what now with him? There's always something, Audie, that was a dull day in Elon Musk land. You know, I think this is a response to the rise of a lot of big A.I. platforms that are starting to scrape big social media platforms for data to help train their algorithms. You saw Reddit a few weeks ago said that they would start to charging developers for some of that back and to access. They got a lot of pushback from their community. It seems like Elon Musk is trying to do something similar. But the difference, Audie, is that this is going to have a huge impact on the everyday users experience with Twitter. You saw some people tweeting frustration yesterday, ironically tweeting frustration about Twitter. That they weren't able to get severe weather updates, critical news and information because they were being limited to the number of posts that they were able to view. Now, Elon Musk has not said how long he's going to implement this temporary crackdown, but I do know that it's going to be frustrating for advertisers because they're reliant on have the usage in order to fulfill their ad campaigns, make sure they have enough people watching and reading tweets in order to insert their ads between them, theoretically reliant on them for business. But one quick fact check, what's this about maybe him not paying his bills. Can you talk about what's going on there? There have been so many reports, whether it's been submitted to B2B vendors or its licensing or its leases, if you will, that Twitter has struggled to pay its bills. And that's because Twitter is really struggling with profitability right now. Now, to be honest, Twitter has always struggled with profitability even before Elon Musk took over. But the difference is that they are not a publicly traded company. They do not need to be transparent about their finances, what money they're bringing in and what money they're spending And so it seems like the company is just in this sort of chaotic spot where it's trying to stay afloat, but it's not necessarily doing it in the most transparent way. We keep getting reports not also just about not paying bills, but they're still in litigation with former employees about paying out severance, etc. So expect Twitter to continue to be in the sort of financial chaos until maybe they can turn the platform around. But I'm still skeptical, Audie, even though they have put in a new chief executive, this platform continues to be chaos. As I cover it. All right, Sara, stay with us. I want to bring Shelby and Earl back in. You're so jealous that you didn't write the program is broadcast worthy to be right there. I think why I love listening to Sarah talk about this is because I'm fascinated by the business story. Less, less on the myopic like Navel-gazing people being angry about their tweets not being available and all that sort of stuff. But from a business perspective, they bring in Linda Marino, a big time executive. It's supposed to juice up their advertising and, you know, I'm asking Elon Musk, how does this end? Well, it's not going to be pretty. At this point, the estimate is that under Elon Musk, the company has lost two thirds of its value. He paid $44 billion for it. It's worth something like 50 billion. And that's not good. Right? Right. Right, right. Not good. It's not going to be the number to go in the other direction. The fact that advertisers and important users like the National Weather Service and others are saying like this, this may not be for us the algorithm is it still sort of promotes and favors, you know, kind of anger and division and outrage, making it a much less pleasant user experience. For everybody who's left on it. And then this idea that you're going to get out of it by paying eight bucks, which has just been roundly rejected, they've got very, very few subscribers even among their daily users. So as a business, it just seems to be falling apart. Now, it's it's got a lot of sort of potential. It's got a lot of residual affection. It's got a lot of users apolitical tool. Right. We have 20, 24 coming up. I mean, do campaigns think they're going to still be using Twitter? Yeah, I think well, I think the big thing is if it was just this change, it would be a huge change. But given how much Elon Musk has already changed the platform, like I know personally, I feel like the platform is a little bit less reliable now in terms of me finding verified news that has been fact-checked and is legitimate And so I think in that sense, it's a little bit less of a priority for campaigns. I mean, Donald Trump is still not on the platform, for example. I do think pre Elon Musk, he would have more of a reason to join it. Sir, with the time we have left, I mean, from a business perspective, from a one day Carino perspective, do that when you talk to both people inside the company, but also analysts outside? Is there a pathway that exists here to kind of get them out of this just constant state of tumult and seeming collapse, followed by resuscitation, followed by some new strategy that I can't figure out there is a pathway. One of the things that you're going to hear internally a lot is that Linda brings assurance to the talent inside. There's still some people who are great salespeople, who are great engineers that want just guidance and direction and some assurance that things aren't going to change that much. And they're hoping that Linda will bring some consistency. But from the outside world, the perspective of the advertisers and marketers, I just spent a good week with them at a big advertising festival overseas. And the thing that you keep hearing is that Twitter is still the most relevant public square for political discourse. You have media, which is the parent company that Instagram and Facebook that's trying to build out a rival. You have small budding rivals like Mastodon and Blue Sky. But at the end of the day, Twitter is still the biggest public square in the world. And so if Elon Musk can figure this out, there's definitely a product case to be made for it being relevant. I'm just not quite sure, quite frankly, if he's going to be able to do it and keep Linda Guarino at his side and she doesn't get too frustrated and just leave. Yeah. It's fascinating to watch it all play out. Sara, thanks as always for the great reporting. I.
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