Elon Musk's move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by the company's new Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, marketing industry professionals said, warning that it could also prove to be "catastrophic" for the platform's business.
Twitter chief Elon Saturday decided to limit the number of tweets a user could see in light of "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation.
The move has upset many Twitter users, forcing them to mull quitting the platform. "Goodbye Twitter" trended following Musk's announcement.
In line with the new guidelines, the social platform has limited tweets for verified accounts to 10,000, 1,000 tweets per day for non-verified users, and 500 tweets for new unverified accounts.
Musk, who also owns SpaceX, did not give a timeline for how long will the new measures remain in place.
The ad industry's experts said the measure could disturb the plans for the new Twitter CEO, who took charge last month.
The Financial Times reported last week that the new chief executive plans to mend relations with advertisers, who pulled their content from the platform following Musk's purchase of Twitter.
Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said Sunday that the move is "remarkably bad" not only for users, but advertisers as well, who are already shaken by the "chaos" that Musk brought to Twitter.
"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.
Founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory Lou Paskalis said Yaccarino is 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," Paskalis said.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said the move to limit tweets for users could prove "catastrophic" for Twitter's business.
"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 added.