Twitter seems to be restricting site content to those with accounts, meaning anyone who’s not logged in cannot see tweets. Numerous reports have noted the apparent change and you can see it for yourself by attempting to access tweets while not signed in.
The cause of the change is unclear. It could very well be a sitewide glitch, a new policy from Twitter mandating that viewers of its site have accounts, or an unannounced attempt at testing the waters ahead of such a policy being instituted. Neither Twitter owner Elon Musk, nor CEO Linda Yaccarino or Twitter Support have commented on the matter via Twitter.
If this sitewide account mandate is, in fact, not a glitch and is the platform’s new norm, it could be linked to Twitter’s push to regain advertisers, the likes of which could be attracted back to the tweet-verse by a sudden surge in user signups and eyeballs to advertise to. Yaccarino, an advertising veteran, is saddled with the responsibility of righting the ship, so perhaps a measure as drastic as removing Twitter’s “anyone can view” stance is part of a hard push to retool the site in a way that makes it a more profitable endeavor.
Twitter’s been in a less-than-stellar financial situation for some time now, the likes of which hasn’t been helped by Elon Musk, who has stated he’ll say whatever he wants regardless of whether his remarks hurt his company’s bottom line. Despite this vocal stance, his behind-the-scenes actions with Yaccarino could be more aligned with profitable behavior. For example, he recently championed a change to the Twitter Blue subscription service that takes away a feature from regular accounts so that people have increased incentive to pay for Blue.
In the event Twitter is indeed now requiring signups to view the site’s content, it remains to be seen whether such a move will be sustainable and increase account creation figures or have the reverse effect and drive people away from the site, reducing its traffic and relevance.
Twitter responded to TheWrap’s request for comment with its customary poop emoji that is used for all media inquiries.
