Twitter chaos opens door for Meta’s rival apps

PARIS, France — Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, while tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week In the meantime, we are facing new challenges.

Zuckerberg’s metagroup, which owns Facebook, has listed the new app as “Instagram App Threads” in stores, available for pre-order in the US, with the message that it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two have clashed for years, but recent comments from Meta executives suggesting Twitter wasn’t running “sanely” infuriated Musk, and the two eventually got into a cage brawl. to each other.

Since buying Twitter for $44 billion last year, Musk has laid off thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to get blue checkmarks and “verified” accounts.

Over the weekend, he restricted the posts readers could see and decreed that no one would be able to see the tweets unless they were logged in. This means that external links no longer work for many people.

He said artificial intelligence (AI) companies are collecting “extreme levels” of data to train their models, requiring them to spin up additional servers just to handle the demand.

But commentators have scorned the idea, with marketing pundits saying he has alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to make money.

In another move that has shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor multiple accounts at once, will be restricted to verified accounts starting next month.

John Wivey, 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 Mr. He said he also gave them a technical reason to quit.

It added that Musk’s decision to lay off thousands of workers meant the site had long been expected to be “technically unusable.”

“remarkably bad”

Musk has said he wants to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising and increase revenue from subscriptions.

But he recently elected advertising expert Linda Yaccarino as chief executive, who said she would fight “hand-to-hand” to win back advertisers.

Former Twitter head of marketing Justin Taylor said: “How do you tell advertisers on Twitter that their ads may not be shown due to data usage limits for the most engaged free users? ” he tweeted.

Mike Purx, vice president of market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s disruption was “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers rely on reach and engagement, and Twitter is currently disrupting both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter was “moving from stable to upstart,” Yaccarino, who was quiet over the weekend, would struggle to regain trust, and the door would be open for Twitter’s rivals to siphon cash from advertisers. He said he would remain as he is.

“Open Secret”

The technical reasons Musk gave for restricting user opinion quickly sparked backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk simply didn’t pay for the server.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI companies are more likely to train models based on books and media articles than on social network content, but social network content is “of much lower quality.” , full of errors and lacking context.”

Yoel Roth, who resigned as Twitter’s head of security just weeks after Musk took office, said the idea that data scraping caused performance problems enough to force users to log in “passed the sniff test. I won’t,” he said.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter’s data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network, another of Twitter’s rivals.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

— AFP