Twitter 2.0’s trial and error strategy continues, with the platform now backtracking on its transfer to limit tweet entry to non-logged in customers.
Effectively, to a sure diploma.
Right this moment, Search Engine Roundtable has reported that Twitter has carried out a brand new course of that may guarantee tweets are viewable by unregistered customers, and are importantly nonetheless listed by Google, which was an unintended aspect impact of its latest tweet viewing restrictions.
As per SER:
“Twitter made a change prior to now 24 hours or in order that now Google and unregistered customers can see the tweet, however there’s a modal that overlays asking customers to join Twitter. Which means Google Search can now crawl and render tweets and see the content material within the tweet, thus index it and finally rank that content material.”
Final Friday, as a part of its broader efforts to fight knowledge scrapers, Twitter took the controversial step of blocking all non-logged in users from viewing tweets, prompting guests, as a substitute, to enroll and log-in to the app.
That was a precursor to Twitter’s much more controversial determination to implement limits on how many tweets users can view in a given time frame, which was the newest Elon-led transfer to spark angst among the many Twittersphere.
In consequence, Twitter additionally, inadvertently, restricted tweet entry to Google’s crawlers as properly, which noticed a massive drop in tweets appearing in SERPs, a key site visitors driver for the app.
Twitter has properly now corrected this, whereas additionally seemingly imposing new restrictions on tweet viewing, preserving in keeping with its new anti-scraping push.
The brand new tweet viewing limits, which Twitter says are a short lived measure, have been carried out so as to cease generative AI initiatives from scraping tweet knowledge to gas their conversational fashions.
A number of hundred organizations (possibly extra) have been scraping Twitter knowledge extraordinarily aggressively, to the purpose the place it was affecting the true consumer expertise.
What ought to we do to cease that? I’m open to concepts.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
Twitter and Reddit, specifically, have turn into key targets for this data, which is why each are actually trying to lock down their platforms to cease their knowledge being utilized by the rising variety of giant language mannequin (LLM) initiatives.
However that does include unintended effects.
For one, proscribing how a lot folks can use the app will clearly restrict utilization, and Twitter depends on utilization as a driver for its advert enterprise. Stopping non-users from viewing tweets can even influence the identical, with Twitter’s own data exhibiting that 40% of its utilization is from ‘logged out friends’.
How Twitter implements a repair for that is unclear, but it surely’s apparently now engaged on new measures to restrict tweet entry, whereas additionally enabling broader tweet viewing and engagement.
Guaranteeing tweets are listed by Google was a key consideration, and it’ll have an interest to see, now, whether or not Twitter can implement comparable options to filter content material viewing.
