Musk is not cracking down on bots for July 4th

Recently I came across someone arguing that Elon Musk's latest restrictions on Twitter are about defeating bots.

What's he's trying to do has nothing with preventing bots. He's doing one of the following:

• Continuing an attempt to monetize Twitter's ecosystem
• Responding to bandwidth limitations from AWS/GCP (Amazon/Google cloud services).

First Case

If he's attempting to monetize Twitter's ecosystem, then the action is a part of a cat-and-mouse game with the larger Twitter ecosystem.  Earlier this year he locked down third party access to Twitter's API.  When he blocked third party apps and free read-access to the APIs, most developers took one of two actions:

• Completely dropped their Twitter integration.
• Scraped Twitter's web pages to continue getting the data.

A lot of technical organizations took the first path, my employer included. Those who depended upon their integration with Twitter generally took the second path. (It's cheaper than paying.)

His current action, limiting read access to the web UI, may very well be a response to the second group. He's trying to try to get them to pay for what was free.

Second Case

Elon Musk is on the record as telling his employees not to pay Twitter's bills. This is *completely* on the record and well documented in court filings.  ("Behind The Bastards" has a whole episode on this where they basically read through one of the lawsuits.)  Musk hasn't paid the rent on Twitter's headquarters since he bought the company. There's no reason to expect that he's treating AWS and GCP any differently. 

Unlike his business with the landlord, Twitter is a drop in the bucket to AWS and GCP. Musk doesn't have the muscle that he thinks he has with these services. They'll cut off his bandwidth if he doesn't pay.  Twitter still has at least one of their own data centers though, so, if they could *drastically* reduce their bandwidth requirements, then they might be able to serve within the new bandwidth restrictions, as a counter move.  This latest change took place at end of the quarter, exactly when AWS and GCP would have put bandwidth restrictions (for failure to pay) into place.

This latest change has all the marks of a knee-jerk reaction. The way Twitter rolled the changes resulted in a self-DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack by their own client applications. In private professional channels people have been laughing their ass off at the scale of this technical self-own.

The problem is that since Musk took over Twitter, the engineering organization keeps doing shit like this, so it's hard to draw any conclusions. This could have been a response to external stimuli, or this could have been a response to one Musk's wild whims. It's hard to tell, because the results are basically indistinguishable.

However, nobody I know involved in this industry believes that it's part of a campaign against bots.