Zuckerberg’s Meta group has released a new app to stores as “Threads, an Instagram app.”
Paris, France:
Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he faces a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.
Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has posted a new app to stores as “Threads, an Instagram app,” available for pre-order in the United States, with a message “expecting” this Thursday is becoming.
The two men have clashed for years, but a recent comment from a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “healthily” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other for a cage fight.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, he has laid off thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month for a blue check mark and a “verified” account.
Over the weekend, he limited the number of posts readers could view and stipulated that no one could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.
He said he needed additional servers to meet demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies collected “extreme levels” of data to train their models.
But commentators have expressed disdain for that idea, and marketing experts say it has massively alienated both its user base and the advertisers it needs to make a profit.
In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that lets users monitor multiple accounts at once, will be limited to verified accounts next month.
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that many people wanted to leave Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave as well.
And he added that Musk’s decision to lay off thousands of workers meant the site was long expected to become “technically unusable”.
– ‘Remarkably bad’ –
Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less dependent on ads and increase subscription revenue.
Yet he recently chose ad specialist Linda Yaccarino as his CEO, and she has spoken of a “hand-to-hand fight” to win back advertisers.
“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users may never see their ads due to data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.
Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos was “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers alike.
“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement, but Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.
He said Twitter had “gone from stable to startup” and that Yaccarino, who went silent over the weekend, would struggle to regain credibility, leaving the door open for Twitter’s rivals to suck money from advertisers.
– ‘Open Secret’ –
Musk’s technical reasons for limiting user opinion immediately caused a backlash.
Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply not paid the bill for his servers.
French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI companies are more likely to train their models on books and media articles than on social network content, which is “much lower quality, full of errors and without context”.
Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s chief of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that scraping data had caused such performance issues that users had to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on social network Bluesky, another Twitter rival.
“We knew about it. It was fine.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
