If these data scraping operations is as sophisticated and determined as he claims this measure is insufficient and actually it really hurts Twitter far more than it helps. Case in point: we stopped sharing Twitter links because when you click them in most iOS apps it opens up an unauthenticated web view and presents you with a login screen. So we just collectively decided “ah ok no sharing Twitter” and moved on.
I’m sure there are companies scraping Twitter. I just don’t buy that it’s as big of an issue as he claims it is, and that preventing people from viewing tweets without logging in is a way to mitigate against that (I’d first look at banning problematic IP addresses first, personally).
To me it’s either:
1) a very poor and very temporary mitigation against scraping, that could be bypassed with a bit of effort
2) an experiment in optimising metrics - Musk sees lots of unauthenticated users consuming Twitter, tries to steer them into signing up
3) it’s all just a big mistake
Option #2 makes the most sense to me, but frankly none of them are good