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New "temporary limits" on all Twitter accounts, announced by Elon Musk, have led to reported outages across the social media platform as it attempts to monetize the service and cut costs.
Musk tweeted Saturday afternoon that he had taken new action to combat "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." The platform will temporarily restrict the number of tweets users can view per day.
Unverified accounts are now limited to viewing 800 posts each day, while new accounts that have not been verified will be limited to only 400 posts per day, Musk wrote.
Amid this, claims have appeared that Google had begun removing Twitter links from its search crawls, seemingly in response to the alterations.
The Claim
A tweet by entrepreneur William LeGate, posted on July 4 and viewed 2.1 million times, read: "BREAKING: Google has removed the vast majority of Twitter links from their search results... Elon's decision to block the Google "bot" from crawling their site is reportedly to blame.
"Twitter will now be invisible on the world's largest search engine 🫥"
Another tweet by Occupy Democrats founder Omar Rivero, posted on July 3 and viewed 2 million times, read: "Twitter owner Elon Musk is hit with more devastating news as Google drops bombshell, retaliates against Twitter for Musk's decisions to limit the amount of tweets that users can read per day and force users to log in just to view a single tweet.
"Google punished Musk and Twitter by removing the vast majority of Twitter's links from its search results — a move that will make Twitter virtually invisible on the world's largest and most popular search engine.
"Analysts just revealed that Google has already removed a whopping 52% of Twitter's links in only two days — and it's showing no signs of slowing down."
The Facts
Twitter users reported outages Saturday morning into the afternoon, according to DownDetector.com as changes were made. Reports began increasing around 8 a.m. ET and at roughly 11 a.m. ET. Many users received an error message reading "rate limit exceeded," referring to the number of tweets that can be viewed.
Musk initially announced the limitations as being lower before amending those numbers. He first said that unverified accounts would be limited to 600, new unverified accounts to 300, and verified users to 6,000 tweets per day.
Although LeGate and Rivero did not include a link to a verified statement about the effect this may have had at Google, the search engine giant has stated that it has seen an effect in its ability to crawl for tweets, hinting the reason was linked to recent changes at Twitter.
In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Lara Levin said: "We're aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,
"Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content."
Levin confirmed to Newsweek that Google had not taken any action to remove tweets.
"The absence of Twitter pages in search results is attributed to what we noted [previously], which was changes to the site that limited our crawler access," Levin told Newsweek.
The spokesperson added that since last week, Twitter appeared to have made updates that did not block search engine crawlers, adding "You can observe this yourself by searching for Twitter profiles, for example, and see that Twitter pages and tweets are showing up in results."
Glenn Gabe, an SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive, tweeted on July 5, 2023, that updates appear to have been made, writing: "Looks like changes are being implemented. Twitter is now using a modal window for users not logged in (and Google can see the tweet content below the modal). And search visibility is bouncing back.
"Much better than the redirect errors..."
To see if there was an effect, Newsweek tested the top 10 trending daily searches in the U.S. via Google Trends. Results from only three of these produced Twitter crawls on the front page of Google: Meta social media site Threads, basketball player Grant Williams, and actor Keke Palmer.
Twitter pages (not result crawls) for two other topics (George Michael and disgraced actor Allison Mack) also appeared.
Other searches on common current affairs keywords (such as Trump, Biden, Ukraine, Putin) on only a handful of occasions returned official Twitter accounts where available, and no crawl searches.
The lack of crawl searches on this topic, however, may be a result of many other sites competing for SEO ranking on Google, alongside Twitter.
The Verge also reported that indexed Twitter URLs in Google search between Friday, June 30, 2023, and Monday, July 3, 2023, for "site:twittter.com" fell from 471 million results to 180 million.
While these tests are not forensic, they do seemingly demonstrate the effect that Twitter's changes may have had (which be temporary, despite reports of updates).
Nonetheless, the rate-limiting of tweets and other changes made to Twitter appears to show—supported by the statements made by Google—they had an effect on the search engine's ability to return Twitter results. Crucially, Google confirmed that it did not remove these results.
Newsweek has contacted Twitter and Google for comment.
Even those who have purchased the premium Twitter Blue are now limited in how many tweets they can view. They, alongside those who are verified, will be able to see 8,000 posts per day, according to Musk.
More details about these limitations, including what specifically prompted the change and how long they will last, remain unknown.
The Ruling
False.
A Google spokesperson told Newsweek it had not removed Twitter results from its crawls and that updates to Twitter since Elon Musk's changes last week were beginning to revert the effects of those changes.
Testing trending and common keywords show that Twitter crawls do appear but only on a handful of search terms for now.
Update 07/05/23, 11:57 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include a statement from Google. The ruling was amended in response.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
About the writer
Tom Norton is Newsweek's Fact Check reporter, based in London. His focus is reporting on misinformation and misleading information in ... Read more