They locked down Twitter... It could be a good thing.

Earlier, I talked about how Twitter made itself available only to logged in users, but I missed something else too. Twitter also limited the viewable tweets every day to 600 for unverified (unpaid) accounts. 300 if your account is new. For verified (paid) accounts the limit is now 6000. Officially Elon Musk says that the reason why he did this (take Twitter private adn reduce the available data) is to prevent scraping. So here’s a question? Who is scraping Twitter? Is it you? Is it me? No, it’s data miners, and data at this level is only being mined at gigantic corporation or government levels. Agencies and organizations that were mining Twitter data to profile individuals or to monitor narrative are suddenly at a loss. Without a feed they are blinded and while most users can still communicate effectively, they can’t see anymore how the information is flowing. This changes the game in terms of privacy. Unless Twitter gives entities a private pipeline of tweets, you are more secure on Twitter than any other similar public network if you comment on political or sensitive issues. This is a conflict between the marketer and the activist. As a marketer I want data to be open. My data should reach more people and I should have unencumbered access to data, but the activists want to only reach the people they want to influence, and they want to do it in security. Personally I think what Twitter did is not sustainable. You can’t build a social platform that has arbitrary limits. I sometimes read more than 600 tweets in one hour. When Twitter prevents me from spending more time on their platform, they are reducing their own use as a platform because I will spend that time somewhere else. So what’s the solution? How about giving control to those who actually want it? Let Twitter users decide whether their account is publicly accessible (without login) or available only to signed in users (with login) and rethink the limits. This will allow users who want to have public tweets to be indexable, embeddable and readable without login. Those who talk about sensitive topics and are ready for a smaller reach for more anonymity, they can opt for signed in readers only. What do you think? As a marketer and as a human being. Do you have any other ways that the platform could help marketers and still become more secure?