Newly-launched Twitter competitor Threads won’t have ads for now, says the company. Despite hitting 100M registered users in less than a week, parent company Meta has told potential advertisers that it hasn’t yet hit “critical mass” …
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While Twitter’s new CEO has been trying to convince us that the platform can’t be replaced by Threads, it seems the company is privately rather less confident. A developer noticed that Twitter is blocking Threads links in searches, with others confirming it …
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Reports of the death of Twitter have so far been somewhat exaggerated. Musk may have made dumb decision after dumb decision, but each time either did a rapid U-turn shortly afterwards, or the sheer momentum of Twitter as the default social media app has carried it through.
But this time, Musk has not only achieved Michael Scott levels of ineptitude, but Meta has brought forward the launch of its Twitter rival Threads in order to take advantage of the chaos …
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Reddit is going dark in protest at Reddit’s new API pricing, after third-party app Apollo was faced with an unaffordable bill of $20M per year. Dozens of the biggest subreddits plan to go private for two days, with hundreds of others joining in.
In other app news, Elon Musk’s claim that Twitter advertisers have returned appears to be misleading …
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Elon Musk recently admitted that Twitter is now worth less than half of the $44B he paid for it, but it now appears that the current Twitter valuation may actually be a third of the sum he paid …
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There have been conflicting views on the risks to humanity posed by artificial intelligence, with some even going as far as suggesting that AI could make humans extinct. Surprisingly, however, that latter view is shared by many leading experts in artificial intelligence – including the CEOs of both OpenAI and Google DeepMind …
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Academics have been told to delete Twitter data used for research purposes, unless they sign up for API access costing $42,000 per month …
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A Facebook privacy breach has seen parent company Meta fined $1.3B – the largest amount ever imposed for breaking Europe’s tough GDPR privacy laws, according to WSJ sources. The news is expected to be officially announced later today.
The fine also raises questions about the privacy of US Facebook users, as it was levied for exposing European citizens to the much looser rules that apply to American users …
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Twitter advertising is now safer – or, at least, no longer “high risk” – according to the world’s biggest ad agency, GroupM. In other social media news, a group of TikTok creators has filed a lawsuit, calling Montana’s ban on the app “unconstitutional” …
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As widely rumored, the new Twitter CEO has been named as former NBCUniversal advertising exec Linda Yaccarino. Platform owner Elon Musk was making good on a promise he made last year, to abide by the results of a poll telling him to resign as the company’s head …
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Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (aka Woz) has said that the march of AI cannot be stopped – even though he has called for a pause in development – and that we must prepare ourselves for people abusing it to create harder-to-spot scams …
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Twitter emergency alerts were one of the casualties of the company starting to charge for the API access that allows automatic tweeting. Many public services and transport companies were facing unaffordable bills to continue to use the service.
Twitter has now announced a partial U-turn on this, though details remain unclear …
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Twitter Inc. – the company that owned the social network purchased by Elon Musk – no longer exists, according to a court filing. Instead, Twitter is now directly owned by a new Musk company, X Corp …
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Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has joined Elon Musk and leading AI academics in calling for a pause in advanced AI development. Specifically, the open letter asks for a minimum six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 …
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A significant number of users are finding that their Twitter timelines are dominated by tweets from Elon Musk.
It follows the company’s owner complaining to engineers that his tweets weren’t getting as much attention – firing a senior one who told him it wasn’t a technical issue, just people being less interested in what the billionaire had to say …
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Reinstating the accounts of ten users previously banned for hate speech or promoting dangerous conspiracy theories will see Twitter earning millions of dollars in additional ad revenue, according to a new report today.
A separate report says that Twitter engineers have been placed in an impossible position: Musk demanding changes which they cannot implement due to code freezes …
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The planned Microsoft Activision acquisition has been provisionally blocked by the UK’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) …
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