Hey, I is changing the internet. Get ready for more walled gardens. Motelful money starts now.

I'm Dylan Lewis and I'm joined over the airwaves by Motelful Analyst, Asset Charma. Asset, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dylan, I appreciate you having me.

While we are kicking off the second half of 2023, talking about social media properties and the state of the internet.

And Asset, part of the reason for that is over the holiday weekend, Twitter made some adjustments.

Users were seeing that they had to be logged in in order to see tweets. And the company was also limiting the number of posts that users could view in a day.

This rate limiting that we're seeing is supposed to be temporary, but it seems to be in direct response to increased data scraping that we're seeing from AI companies.

Yeah, Dylan, this is something that Elon Musk has talked about. He's concerned that companies can take Twitter's valuable public data for free and repurpose it, commercialize it.

Now, we don't know exactly why Twitter kicked this stuff in over a holiday weekend. There are a bunch of theories around one being that maybe they didn't pay their cloud bills.

I mean, they haven't paid rents on their San Francisco properties. Maybe they have by now, but they didn't for months after Elon Musk took over.

Other theories abounded over the weekend, but on a more serious level, generally what you're saying is a concern of Twitter's the management team.

And I think this is something that has larger implications for use in the internet. We become quite used to being able to freely move around post information, grab information as a society.

So what works in this type of world has also worked in terms of business monetization. That may be changing.

Something that's kind of interesting with this asset is Twitter was kind of the outlier in social media for a while with how open and accessible a lot of its content was.

This seems like a big step if they do wind up going this direction of making it a little bit more difficult or having to be logged in in the sticks.

But this is something that Instagram has done. This is something that Facebook has done. It's just we've kind of used Twitter as this global town square for such a long time that to see anything interrupt that is is a little bit of a surprise I think for people.

I think it makes us realize that this coming wave of AI content has more serious implications. It's coming faster than we expected.

I myself, you know, as you do Dylan spend a lot of time studying the impact of AI on business and society. But these moves are sort of accelerating.

And they're making us rethink, you know, what the nature of content is. I'll give you just one example. You know, this come to my mind.

We use memes all the time as a society. There's a content somebody puts out there maybe from a film or commercial. We grab it. We make a meme out of that.

We pass that around. We repurpose that in platforms like TikTok, which then make money off of memes that are incorporated into short form content. So it's been a freewheeling space for some time.

Twitter has been, as you point out, one of the platforms that has enabled us to have this sort of freewheeling of exchange of ideas, content, some of it commercial, some VHS silly. What is it going to look like in the future?

...