Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is facing criticism for his recent changes to Twitter, as his tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app. Zuckerberg’s Meta group, the owner of Facebook, has listed a new app called “Threads, an Instagram app” in stores for pre-order in the United States, with an expected release date of this Thursday. Musk and Zuckerberg have had a longstanding feud, and a recent comment by a Meta executive claiming that Twitter was not being run “sanely” angered Musk, resulting in the two men challenging each other to a cage fight.
Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion last year, Musk has made significant changes to the platform. He has laid off thousands of employees and introduced a monthly fee of $8 for users to have a blue checkmark and a verified account. Over the weekend, he implemented further restrictions, limiting the posts that readers could view and requiring users to be logged in to access tweets, rendering external links useless for many. Musk claimed that he had to increase server capacity to handle the demand caused by artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraping large amounts of data for training their models.
However, industry commentators and marketing experts have criticized Musk’s decisions, arguing that he has alienated both users and advertisers. By limiting access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor multiple accounts simultaneously, to verified accounts only, Musk has given people a technical reason to leave Twitter, in addition to the ethical concerns they may already have had since he took over. John Wihbey, an associate professor at Northeastern University, stated that the mass layoffs conducted by Musk signaled that the site would eventually become “technically unusable.”
Musk has expressed his desire to decrease Twitter’s reliance on advertising and increase subscription revenue. Yet, his recent appointment of Linda Yaccarino, an advertising specialist, as the company’s chief executive seems contradictory. Yaccarino has spoken about engaging in “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers. Former Twitter marketing executive Justin Taylor highlighted the challenge of explaining to advertisers that their ads may not be seen by the platform’s most engaged free users due to data caps on their usage. Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, described the chaos over the weekend as “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers, asserting that Twitter’s reach and engagement have been significantly impacted.
Musk’s explanation for limiting user views received backlash from social media users. Many speculated that he simply failed to pay the bill for his servers. French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre argued that AI firms are more likely to train their models using books and media articles, as social network content is of lower quality, filled with errors, and lacks context. Yoel Roth, who resigned as Twitter’s head of security shortly after Musk’s takeover, dismissed the notion that data scraping caused the performance issues, forcing users to log in. He stated that scraping was an open secret in accessing Twitter data and that it was well-known and accepted.
As Musk faces criticism for his Twitter changes, Zuckerberg’s Meta Group’s upcoming app release poses a new challenge. With Twitter’s credibility in question and its user base and advertisers potentially seeking alternatives, competitors may seize the opportunity to attract advertising revenue. The rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg continues to shape the tech landscape, with the two entrepreneurs constantly seeking to outdo each other.
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