Elon Musk is making yet another change to his social media platform.
06.07.2023 - 19:43 / variety.com
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor The battle between Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over the launch of Instagram’s Twitter rival Threads has taken a legal turn. On Wednesday, Meta’s Instagram debuted Threads, a text-focused social app designed to piggyback off Instagram’s infrastructure and user base. The app had more than 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning, according to Zuckerberg. In a July 5 cease-and-desist letter addressed to Meta CEO Zuckerberg, a lawyer representing Twitter said that Musk’s company had “serious concerns” that Meta “has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” The letter said that “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”
“Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of Twitter employees,” the letter says, alleging that “Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal laws as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, asked for comment, referred to his post on Threads that said, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.” The letter from Twitter’s lawyers to Meta was first reported by Semafor. Musk, who acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October 2022, has not publicly commented on Threads.
Elon Musk is making yet another change to his social media platform.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Amid deep concerns about the risks posed by artificial intelligence, the Biden administration has lined up commitments from seven tech companies — including OpenAI, Google and Meta — to abide by safety, security and trust principles in developing AI. Reps from seven “leading AI companies” — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — are scheduled to attend an event Friday at the White House to announce that the Biden-Harris administration has secured voluntary commitments from the companies to “help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology,” according to the White House.
Threads is making a big change as it continues to grow exponentially as an alternative to Twitter. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri took to the micro-blogging platform to announce that they would be implementing rate limits to combat bots.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Elon Musk’s Twitter has been accused of failing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in severance to laid-off workers. Now, under a new ad-revenue sharing program, the company just doled out millions to high-profile Twitter users, including controversial right-wing figure Andrew Tate and left-leaning twin brothers Ed and Brian Krassenstein. Twitter announced the ad-revenue sharing program for creators, initially on an invitation-only basis, on Thursday. The company said eligible creators will be paid a share of ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter,” the company said in a blog post about the program.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Twitter was experiencing unexplained technical problems Wednesday, as key features of the Elon Musk-owned social network appeared to be not working correctly. Problem reports with Twitter began spiking around 10:30 a.m. ET on July 12, according to uptime-monitoring service Downdetector. In the U.S., user-reported errors for Twitter’s website and app shot up to more than 7,100 complaints by 10:36 a.m. ET. Of the user reports, 50% were related to the Twitter; 43% were related to the website; and 7% were problems associated with the server connection, according to Downdetector. One of the main problems users reported was the inability to see an account’s tweets from their profile page, at least on the desktop (web) version of the Twitter service. According to Twitter’s API status monitoring page, all systems were operational as of Wednesday morning.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is throwing a little shade at Threads after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his platform had crossed 100 million signups in less than a week.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Not a joke: Comedian and author Sarah Silverman is one of the lead plaintiffs in a pair of lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI accusing the tech companies of illegally using copyrighted works to train their artificial-intelligence systems. The books cited in the lawsuits include Silverman’s 2010 bestselling memoir “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee.” The federal lawsuits, filed Friday, July 7, allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA both ingested text from “The Bedwetter” and other works to train their large language models (LLMs) — without the consent of (or compensation to) authors such as Silverman.
had 30 million users on Thursday, a number which has tripled less than 2 days later and can be verified by the numerical badges displayed on user acounts; those numbers are assigned in the order someone joined, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg being user #1.But Threads, just one of the many new apps to compete directly with Twitter, has a huge advantage over other would-be Twitter killers: An existing infrastructure that can handle demand.Currently Threads is essentially an offshoot of Instagram. Indeed, the only way to sign up at the moment is download the app and sign in with your Instagram login.
On Thursday, a lawyer for Elon Musk’s Twitter accused Meta of leveraging “trade secrets” to launch its Twitter competitor, Threads, which garnered more than 30 million sign ups in its first 24 hours of operation. Musk’s threats, however, did nothing to slow adoption of the new platform. In fact, user takeup increased.
Elon Musk is threatening to sue Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta over the launch of the company’s new social media platform Threads.
Things are getting feisty on social media!
Elon Musk Reacts Amid Outrage Over Temporary Daily Twitter Limitations Linda Yaccarino to Replace Elon Musk as Twitter CEO Chrissy Teigen and More Celebs React to Losing Twitter Verification Here Are the Celebrities Who Have Quit Twitter
Elon Musk Reacts Amid Outrage Over Temporary Daily Twitter Limitations Linda Yaccarino to Replace Elon Musk as Twitter CEO Chrissy Teigen and More Celebs React to Losing Twitter Verification Here Are the Celebrities Who Have Quit Twitter
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Should you ditch Twitter in favor of Instagram’s Threads — which looks quite a lot like a clone of Twitter? Meta launched Threads, a “conversational” text-centric app tied to Instagram, on Wednesday, a day earlier than expected. The internet giant sees an opportunity to take on Twitter, controlled by tech mogul Elon Musk, which has been beset by various technical and business issues since he acquired the company. “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Instagram‘s new app Threads, which was created as a rival to Twitter, has officially launched!
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has unleashed its frontal attack on Twitter, the social network controlled by Elon Musk. On Wednesday (July 5), Meta’s Instagram launched Threads, described as a “text-based conversation app.” The app is available in Apple’s App Store for iOS devices and in Google Play for Android.
Elon Musk is continuing to turn the Twittersphere on its head.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg seem to be moving forward in their proposed cage fight, and the Tesla CEO even suggested that they hold the fight at the Colosseum in Rome, Italy.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor On Friday, Twitter — without notice — suddenly blocked access to the website for anyone who isn’t signed in as a registered user. Many people were confused about the change, wondering whether it was a glitch or a purposeful move on the part of Twitter, which is under the control of mega-billionaire Elon Musk. Previously, you could search Twitter and view tweets without needing a registered account. But now, visiting any Twitter page displays a log-in prompt instead. Musk, in a post Friday afternoon, claimed that Twitter took the step to improve performance on the platform after third-party companies were “scraping” data and overloading its systems. “Temporary emergency measure,” he tweeted. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Could Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg face off at Italy’s most iconic landmark?