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.
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and
technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to
quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given
them a technical reason to leave too.
And he added that Musk's decision to sack thousands of
workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become
"technically unusable".
Remarkably bad
Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on
advertising and boost income from subscriptions.
Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his
chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into "hand-to-hand
combat" to win back advertisers.
"How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most
engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of 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 had been "remarkably bad" for
both users and advertisers.
"Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter
is currently decimating both," he told AFP.
He said Twitter had "moved from stable to startup"
and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore
its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter's rivals to suck up any cash
from advertisers.
Open secret
The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of
users immediately brought a backlash.
Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply
failed to pay the bill for his servers.
French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms
were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social
network content, which "is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and
lacking in context".
Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter's head of security
weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such
performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in "doesn't
pass the sniff test".
"Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,"
he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.
"We knew about it. It was fine."