For some bizarre reason (OK, many widely reported reasons), Twitter is becoming less useful almost by the day. In its latest misstep, it seems the service is no longer letting people who aren’t signed in see any tweets.
Until now, logged-out users were still able to check out tweets and user profiles, but at least for the time being, they’ll have to either sign up for an account or plug in their login credentials to see whatever unattributed meme Twitter owner Elon Musk pinched today. The Verge spotted the issue, which Engadget has confirmed on multiple browsers and devices.
Twitter won’t confirm whether this was a technical error or an intentional decision, as one of Musk’s first moves after he took over the company was to all but wipe out its communications team. In any case, logged-out users haven’t been able to use Twitter’s search function since April.
It’s unclear what kind of impact moves such as this and Twitter’s API changes will have on things like Google being able to include tweets in its search results. This could also prove a roadblock to services that scrape data from public-facing platforms like Twitter.
Making tweets visible only to signed-in users won’t necessarily prompt people to sign up for an account. If someone wants to share a tweet with a person who doesn’t use Twitter, they may now be more inclined to send a screenshot than a link, perhaps making it less likely that the non-user will join the service.
Researchers have found that most US adults are spending less time on Twitter after Musk bought the service. You might think Twitter would be doing whatever it could to get more eyes on tweets and ads, given that its advertising revenue is said to have plummeted. Putting up a barrier between potential new users and content perhaps isn’t the wisest way to go about that.
