Twitter chaos leaves door open for Meta's rival app

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week. Zuckerberg's Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as «Threads, an Instagram app», available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is «expected» this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run «sanely» irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight. Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a «verified» account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many. He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped «extreme levels» of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling. In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.