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Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter followers with further severe changes to the social media behemoth, and he faces a fresh battle this week as tech competitor Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a competing app.
Zuckerberg's Meta company, which owns Facebook, has placed a new app in shops as "Threads, an Instagram app" available for pre-order in the United States, with a notice claiming it is "expected" coming Thursday.
The two men have been feuding for years, but a recent statement by a Meta executive implying that Twitter was not operated "sanely" irritated Musk, leading to the two men proposing each other a cage fight.
Musk has sacked thousands of staff and charged customers $8 per month to acquire a blue checkmark and a "verified" account after purchasing Twitter last year for $44 billion (approximately Rs. 3,37,465 crore).
On the weekend, he restricted the postings that readers could access and declared that no one could look at a tweet unless they were signed in, which means that many external links no longer work.
He said he had to set up more servers merely to keep up with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) firms grabbed "extreme levels" of data to train their models.
However, analysts have slammed that notion, and marketing experts claim he has severely alienated both his user base and the advertising he needs to generate money.
Twitter stated Monday that access to TweetDeck, a software that allows users to monitor many accounts at once, will be restricted to verified accounts beginning next month.
According to John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, many individuals wanted to leave Twitter for ethical grounds once Musk took over, but he has now given them a technological incentive to do so as well.
And he noted that Musk's plan to lay off thousands of workers meant that the site would become "technically unusable" for a long time.
Surprisingly terrible
Musk has stated that he wants to reduce Twitter's reliance on advertising and increase revenue through subscriptions.
Nonetheless, he just appointed advertising professional Linda Yaccarino as CEO, and she has spoken of engaging in "hand-to-hand combat" to reclaim sponsors.
"How do you tell Twitter advertisers that their most engaged free users may never see their ads due to data caps on their usage?" tweeted Justin Taylor, a former Twitter marketing executive.
The weekend's upheaval, according to Mike Proulx, vice president at market research company Forrester, was "remarkably bad" for both users and advertisers.
"Advertisers rely on reach and engagement, but Twitter is decimating both right now," he told AFP.
He said Twitter had "moved from stable to startup" and that Yaccarino, who stayed mute over the weekend, would struggle to reestablish its reputation, leaving the door open for Twitter's competitors to suck up any income from advertisers.
Secret revealed
Musk's technical explanations for restricting consumers' views sparked an instant criticism.
Many social media users suspected that Musk had simply not paid his server fee.
According to Florent Lefebvre, a French social data analyst, AI corporations are more likely to train their models on books and media pieces than social network information, which "is of much lower quality, full of mistakes, and lacking in context."
Yoel Roth, who resigned as Twitter's head of security only weeks after Musk took control, said the argument that data scraping was causing such speed issues that users should be compelled to log in "doesn't pass the sniff test."
"Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access," he wrote on Bluesky, another Twitter competitor.
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