The recent move by Twitter to temporarily cap how many posts users can read on the social media site is likely to affect heavy Thai users, but they will eventually adapt to the new rule, says a marketing communication executive.
Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, said executive chair Elon Musk in a post on the platform on July 1, according to Reuters.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, with unverified accounts facing a quota of 600 posts a day, while new unverified accounts are limited to 300.
The limits were later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
Q: Will this new policy affect Thai users?
Maureen Tan, chief executive of marketing communication agency Wunderman Thompson Thailand, said Twitter remains quite popular in Thailand, with 14 million users as of 2022 and a projection to keep growing.
The Thai user base trends younger and Twitter has served as a critical platform for communication and community empowerment, especially during political activism and protests, she said.
“What is happening so far away in the US [regarding Elon Musk’s policies] often doesn’t affect us in Thailand. People are likely to just get on with it and continue using the platform,” said Ms Tan.
“A check of trending hashtags in Thailand reveals 50% are related to K-Pop. This shows the usage is driven by pop culture and young people will continue to see the free version. It is a key channel where opinions and views are expressed freely.”
However, she said active users will clearly be affected by quotas on post views.
In recent years Twitter announced its intent to filter and better control content. For those willing to pay for a verified account, the intent is to ensure more responsible and better content.
“But humans are humans — how they use it whether they are paying or it is free is up to their whim, which is hard to control,” said Ms Tan.
Q: What do Thai Twitter users think about the reading cap?
According to data compiled by Wisesight, a Bangkok social media analytics consultancy, there were 9,750 messages related to the restriction from July 1-3.
Of the total messages, 1,799 described the new policy negatively, indicating they disagreed with it.
Some felt they were being forced by Twitter to pay for a verified subscription service called Twitter Blue in order to read more posts. They also speculated about the real reasons behind the new policy.
Q: Will the paid verification services of Twitter and Meta affect the Thai advertising industry?
Ms Tan said ad spending on Twitter in Thailand based on the 2022 report of the Digital Advertising Association of Thailand (DAAT) is only 1% of total digital ad spending, compared with a 30% share for Meta.
She does not think the new Twitter policy will change these figures greatly.
According to DAAT, the total digital advertising value last year was 25.7 billion baht.
Ms Tan advises advertisers not to be overly reliant on the biggest platforms, exploring other burgeoning platforms and channels, especially when they target younger audiences.
Q: What do ad industry veterans think about Twitter’s reading limits?
According to Reuters, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino tweeted on July 4 a defence of the temporary cap on reading posts announced on July 1.
Twitter said advertising has been stable in the days since the announcement, which drew heavy criticism from users and marketing professionals.
Ms Yaccarino tweeted: “When you have a mission like Twitter — you need to make big moves to keep strengthening the platform.” It was her first public comment on the limits announced by Mr Musk.
Twitter said only a small percentage of people using the platform have been affected by the limits.
According to Reuters, the move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by Ms Yaccarino to attract advertisers, according to marketing industry professionals.
The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Mr Musk has brought to the platform, said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, on July 2.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Ms Yaccarino is Mr Musk’s “last best hope” to salvage ad revenue and the company’s value.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” Mr Paskalis told Reuters.
Capping how much users can view could be “catastrophic” for the platform’s ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” she said.
Mr Musk expressed displeasure earlier with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Kai-Cheng Yang, researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, said the limits appear to be effective at blocking third parties, including search engines, from scraping Twitter data like before.
“It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and much less efficient,” he said.
